Some Studies In The Modern Novel

SOME STUDIES IN

THE MODERN NOVEL

Dorothy M. Hoare

Fellow and Associate
of Newnham College,

Cambridge

1938

CHATTO & WINDUS
LONDON

Contents

HENRY JAMES Page 3

VIRGINIA WOOLF 36

E. M. FORSTER 68

The Novels of D. H. LAWRENCE 97

The Tragic in HARDY and CONRAD 113
MOORE and JOYCE — A contrast 133

A Note on KATHERINE MANSHELD 148

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most of these essays were delivered as lectures in the
English Faculty at Cambridge : I have thought it best not
to alter them too much in re-casting, preferring to retain
something of the vitality of the spoken word.

I record with pleasure my indebtedness to my friends
Mrs. N. K. Chadwick and Miss Enid "Welsford for the
stimulus of their encouragement and criticism, and to
Newnham College for its generous support -with
publication.

Acknowledgments are due to the Editors of The New
Adelphi, The Cambridge Review and the Everyman series,
where parts of these essays have appeared.

HENRY JAMES

Henry James is a writer who is capable of infinite sur-
prises. For instance between Henry James and Virginia
Woolf, perhaps the most modem of the modem novelists,
there is an affinity of technique and to some extent of
subject matter. Yet Henry James began writing in the
seventies, a period which it is true produced Gerard Man-
ley Hopkins but which also produced Ruskin, Rossetti,
Morris, whose work one would hesitate to call distinctly
“contemporary.” “Contemporary” is however the
adjective which I think we shall find ourselves finally
applying to Henry James . 1

Again, there is no one about whom critical prejudice

1 And it has of course been applied to him, by Stephen Spender,
who in his book The Destructive Element , puts forward James as the
first communist. I should state that my remarks on James [given
first as a lecture some time before Mr. Spender’s book appeared, and
substantially unchanged since] have found corroboration from his
opinions there. I cannot however agree with all of Mr. Spender’s
views on James, particularly on his communism. I would say that
James’ insistence on a personal morality which very often is not the
conventional one indicates his awareness of the insecurity of his social
world and may be taken as an indirect criticism of it ; for of course
in an ideal society personal and social moral values would not be at
variance. This is however as far as I should wish to go. Anything as
anarchical as communism would have been antipathetic to James, in
my opinion.

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

has been more definitely pre-conceived. Until very
recently, if one had asked anyone who had not made a
very close study of the novels or gone topmost of the
writers who had, for an opinion, the general criticism
disengaged would have been one of arid intellectual web-
spinning. “That ingenious spider weaving his webs . . .
to me he had no appeal,” said Jane Harrison. Similarly
E. M. Forster voices what one might call the general in-
tellectual attitude to James, in Aspects of the Novel. There
he points out one of the aspects of James’ work which has
always been singled out for attention. “Many readers,”
he says, “cannot grant his premise, which is that most of
human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.”
A very damning indictment. And again, in a brilliant
image, “No social explanation of the world we know is
possible (for James’ characters), for there are no stupid
people in their world, no barrier of language, and no poor.
Even their sensations are limited. Maimed creatures can
alone breathe in Henry James’ pages — maimed yet special-
ized. They remind one of the exquisite deformities who
haunted Egyptian art in the reign of Akhnaton— huge
heads, and tiny legs, but nevertheless charming. In the
following reign they disappear.”

And finally, this time coming right out in the open with
his charge — “There is no philosophy in the novels, no
religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no
prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It (the
maiming of human life) is for the sake of a particular
aesthetic effect, which is certainly gained, but at this
price.”

It is easy to dispose of the first objection, by admitting
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HENRY JAMES

that a great deal of it is true but not necessarily derogatory
— “there are no stupid people in his world, no barrier of
language, and no poor.” To that extent it is admittedly
an artificial world. Theodora Bosanquet, who worked
with Henry James in his latter years as his secretary, says
some excellent and penetrating things in one of the
Hogarth essays. 1 “By 1909, the men and women of
Henry James could talk only in the manner of their
creator. His own speech, assisted by the practice of
dictating, had by that time become so inveterately char-
acteristic that his questions to a railway clerk about a
ticket or to a fishmonger about a lobster, might easily be
recognized as coined m the same mint as his addresses to
the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Litera-
ture.” And again, “To be ‘inarticulate’ was for him the
cardinal social sin. It amounted to a wilful withholding
of treasures of alien experience. . . . (Such) numerous
(inarticulate) persons he dismissed from his attention as
‘simple organisms.’ These he held to be mere waste of
any writer’s time.” These remarks are corroborated by
a letter written from Italy in 1874, where Henry James
complains that he has had no stimulus worth mentioning
for over a year, for the only people he had talked to were
washerwomen and waiters, both coming into the category
of “simple organisms,” and therefore useless to the
literary man.

Admittedly, in James’ world there are no stupid people,
no barriers of language, and no poor. Yet is this state-
ment which Forster uses as a means of condemnation,
anything more than a negative way of describing the
1 Henry James at Work. Hogarth Essays, 3. London, 1924.

5

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

limits which James imposed on his work ? We arc here
in much the same position as we should be in defending
Wordsworth from the charge of inanity in the Lyrical
Ballads.

But of course Forster’s charge goes deeper than that,
arid his second objection is more difficult to meet, namely,
the exclusive interest in technique. This indeed seems to
be borne out by Henry James himself, for in one of his
letters written to H. G. Wells, he says : “It is art that
makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I
know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty
of its process.” But there is an immense difference be-
tween being interested in form or pattern as a means to
an end, and being interested in it solely for itself. Nothing
is more evident to anyone who knows James’ work at all
well than that he is intensely interested in pattern, more
indeed than he is in his characters ; but that what governs
his interest in both is the idea to be expressed through
them. I should like, anticipating my proof, to misquote
Forster and say: “The aesthetic is there for a particular
moral effect.” And also to quote from another of James’
letters: “My poetic and my appeal to experience rest
upon . . . my measure of fulness — fulness of life and of the
projection of it. ... I hold that interest may be, must be,
exquisitely made and created, and that if wc don’t make
it, we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make

it for us Of course for myself I live, live intensely and

am fed by life, and my value, whatever it may be, is in
my own kind of expression of that . . . the extension of
life, which is the novel’s best gift.”

A curious phrase for the cold formalist of Forster’s pic-
6

HENRY JAMES

ture. There are two questions to answer. What kind of
extension of life do we find in the novels, and what is
James’ own jbW of expression of that ? The enquiry in-
volves some treatment of the early novels, for they afford
a clear indication that the natural and first interest of
James was in. something very far removed from technical
perfection.

I

Roderick Hudson, written in 1875, is a good example of
James’ early preoccupations, as a bald outline of the story
will show. Roderick Hudson, a young American sculp-
tor of enormous promise, is discovered kicking his heels
in a New England village by Rowland, a wealthy ac-
quaintance, who is there visiting friends. Rowland takes
Roderick with him to Italy, and before they set out,
Roderick reveals the fact that he is engaged to be married
to Mary Garland, a young, serious quiet girl who antici-
pates the later Jamesian heroines. In Italy, Roderick
rapidly attains great reputation no less on account of his
manner which often shows the privileged rudeness of
genius, than because of his artistic powers. In due course
he meets with Christina Light, a sophisticated, clever,
beautiful young girl who makes no secret of the fact that
her mother designs her for the most brilliant marriage she
can attain. Roderick and she feel the common attraction
of a certain strength and lawlessness. They fall in love.
At this point Rowland intervenes, on behalf of Mary
Garland, to whom it must be observed, he on his side, is
silently devoted. Roderick consents to have Mary
brought to Rome to counteract Christina’s influence..

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

Christina consents to renounce her influence on Roderick.
The plan however does not work. Christina, forced by
an unexpected crisis, marries a wealthy and famous Italian
prince. Roderick goes to Switzerland ; but by mischance
Christina also is there, and they meet. That night
Roderick spends walking in the mountains : there is a
terrific thunderstorm ; Roderick does not appear at the
inn where Rowland and his friends await him, and in the
morning a frenzied search-party find him dead at the foot
of a ravine.

Such is the story. It will be obvious how similar this
is to the opening theme of The Ambassadors (written in
1903), and how very differently James uses his material
in the later book. Here the story moves in a leisurely
fashion; it has room for descriptions of the artist’s re-
actions to various stimuli, and for conversations on the
freedom of an artist’s life and its peculiar laws — a theme
which finds somewhat different handling in The Tragic
Mur & — a history not of a sculptor but of a great actress.
Some of the action, as the plot reveals, is open to the
charge of melodrama — a charge again to be levelled at
another novel written about the same time, The American.
In it we have the story of an American business man who
dared to aspire to the hand of a French countess ; and a
murder, a duel, a death-bed confession, and other such
ingredients of the normal third-rate thriller are introduced
either as vital to the main action or as sub-plot.

It may be objected that it is unfair to produce merely
- the outline of the plot of any novel, and say that it is
highly romantic or even melodramatic. What I should
like to stress here is that in Roderick Hudson and the early

8

HENRY JAMES

novels generally, the plot is important, it is the centre of
the book, in a way in which the plot of The Ambassadors
for example is not. In The Ambassadors , action is con-
spicuous by its absence ; there is nothing of the rapid
transition from event to event, from spectacular event to
event, that there is in Roderick Hudson or The American .
The success of the later book is bound up with what one
might call the gradual weathering of the character by a
- series of infinitely small, internal mental exertions, and
depends on the subtlety and intricacy of development,
and not on the boldness of any external action.

If a typical passage from Roderick Hudson is compared
with any of the later works, we shall be nearer to the
problem of Henry James’ art. Here for example is an
account of Roderick given to Rowland at the beginning
of the book :

His mother is a widow of a Massachusetts country family,
a little timid tremulous woman who is always on pins and
needles about her son. She had some property herself and
married a Virginia gentleman — an owner of lands and slaves.
He turned out, I believe, a dreadful rake, and made great
havoc in their fortune. Everything, or almost everything,
melted away, including Mr. Hudson himself. This is liter-
ally true, for he drank himself to death. Ten years ago his
wife was left a widow with scanty means and a couple of
growing boys . . . Roderick, our friend, was her pride and
joy ; but Stephen, the elder, was her comfort and support.

I remember him later ; he was a plain-faced, sturdy, practical
lad, very different from his brother, and in his way I imagine
a very fine fellow.

No critic, I imagine, would accuse this kind of writing
of being too mannered, nor could one say with truth that

9

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

there is much interest in technique evinced here. The
expression is clumsy and full of cliches, and there is no
trace of any precision of statement. It is a piece of writing
which one might find in any newspaper, and I quote it
merely to show how loose, how unformed, how un-
mannered, James’ early work could be. A more inter-
esting example from the same novel is the description of
Mary Garland :

Her face . . . was not ... a quick and mobile face, over which
expression flickered like a candle in the wind. They fol-
lowed each other slowly, distinctly, sincerely, and you might
almost have fancied that, as they came and went, they gave
her a sort of pain. She was tall and slender and had an air
of maidenly strength and decision. She had a broad fore-
head and dark eyebrows, a trifle thicker than those of
classical beauties ; her grey eye was clear but not brilliant
and her features were bravely irregular. She wore a scanty
white dress, and had a nameless rustic, provincial air.

But what is this reminiscent of > Surely

She had a rustic woodland air
And she was wildly clad.

In other words, it recalls the romantic utterance at its
height.

One of the first characteristics, then, of the early James,
is a strong romantic sensibility, and anyone criticizing
Roderick Hudson, The American, The Tragic Muse, would
have felt inclined to warn the writer, not of indulgence
in too rigid and formal a technique but of the danger of
romantic excess, in situation, in sentiment, in description
— of loose feeling and loose writing.

Let me now quote a passage from a novel written in

io

HENRY JAMES

1902, perhaps James’ most typical, if not his best — cer-
tainly one which reveals all his central characteristics —
The Wings of the Dove . The passage comes from the
opening chapter (a description of the heroine) and may
serve very well as a contrast to the portrait of Mary
Garland :

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he
kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which
she showed herself in the glass over the mantel, a face
positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to
the point of going away without sight of him. It was at
this point, however, that she remained ; changmg her place,
moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered
in a glazed cloth that gave at once — she had tried it — the
sense of the slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at
the sallow prmts on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a
year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass
and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to
enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the central table ;
she had above all from time to time taken a brief stand on
the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave
access. . . . Each time she turned in again, each time in her
impatience she gave him up, it was to sound a deeper depth,
while she tasted the faint flat emanation of things, the failure
of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was
really in a manner that she mightn’t add the shame of fear,
of individual, of personal collapse, to all the other shames.
To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth
and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small salutary
sense at least of neither shirking nor lying. This whole

vision was the worst thing yet (But) wasn’t it in fact the

partial escape from this “worst” in winch she was steeped,
to be able to make herself out again as agreeable to see ? She
stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be staring
at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

closely feathered hat, retouched, beneath it, the thick fall of
her dusky hair ; kept her eyes aslant no less on her beautiful
averted than on her beautiful presented oval. . . . She was
handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items
and aids; a circumstance moreover playing its part at
almost any time in the impression she produced. The im-
pression was one that remained, but as regards the sources
of it no sum in addition would have made up the
total.

This is an intricate opening to a story which needs very -
careful balance in the telling. How full, in comparison
with Roderick Hudson, the texture has become — scene,
person, atmosphere, mental state, all inter-reacted. In the
early novels, much time is wasted in straightforward and
naive description of the kind already quoted [in a sense,
there is more room in the early work than in this
tightened, close writing ; in The American, for instance,
James finds space for a humorous description of a New
England parson, a character put in merely for malicious
amusement in type. He has nothing to do with the story,
and after his first appearance doesn’t recur again. And
his portrait in itself is amusing and interesting]. But
generally, in the early novels, the lights and shades are not
managed well ; and if the later James is all a matter of
obscure greys, these are much too hard black and white,
approaching perilously near the caricature of Victorian
melodrama. In the early novels a rambling and discursive
method is adopted because as yet he does not know his
artistic business. In the later novels, with which I shall
■ most be concerned, all the apparent long-windedness is
given solely for the purpose of greater accuracy in de-
finition. It is obvious that between Roderick Hudson and

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HENRY JAMES

The Wings of the Dove there has been a complete change
of style, an advance in technique so startling that it almost
looks as though technique had become the chief aim. I
hope to prove that this is exactly what it had not.

2

Any consideration of the later novels brings out the
astonishing fact that they are all, in more or less degree,
and with more or less emphasis, saying the same thing.
From The Spoils of Poynton in 1897 to his last two books
written in 1915, we have a series of eight or nine novels
(The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward
Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden
Bowl, The Ivory Tower, The Sense of the Past), admittedly
containing the best which James wrote, all of which are
divertissements on the same theme, and that theme, a
matter of what one might call “morality.” James knew
that morals were important — he is not a New Englander
for nothing. At the same time this is not what makes
him interesting — it is his peculiar kind of morality, the
peculiar, intricate, subtle interplay of feelings and resolu-
tions between his characters, to make up what one might
call the Jamesian idea of how to live, that is so remarkable.

I was first very much struck by this by chancing to read
three books one after the other, which had been written
in close succession — The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings
of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903). From these
three books it was evident what James was after. They
are all situations of renunciation.

In The Ambassadors, for example, the denouement

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

comes with the change in Strether’s attitude — (he has been
sent, one remembers, to Paris as the elderly friend of the
famil y m America, to save Chadwick Newsome from an
entanglement with a Frenchwoman)— the denouement
comes with the change in Strether’s attitude from desire
to bring Chadwick away, free from this intrigue, to not
only an acceptance of the situation, but a positive in-
junction that Chadwick shall stay, though without legal
or conventional right, and reward Mme. de Vionnet’s
services to him with the strictest loyalty. But behind this
there is a second situation, even more important to
Strether than Chadwick’s affairs. His own relationship
with his friend and adviser Maria Gostrey, has come to a
critical point — she practically offers him her devotion :

He took a minute to say, for, really and truly, what stood
about him there in her offer — which was as die offer of
exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days,
might well have tempted. It built him softly round, it
roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection.

The final and crucial passage of the book comes with
Strether’s refusal to permit himself (for it would involve
a loss of integrity on his part, his feeling for Mme. de
Vionnet being what it is) to accept this offer :

That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole
affair, to have got anything for myself.

Even more clearly The Awkward Age and The Wings
of the Dove reveal this point. In both the same theme is
discussed with slight differentiations, and brought to the
same inevitable end. In both there is what might be
termed a purification following on trial. In The

H

HENRY JAMES

Wings of the Dove , Merton Densher has to choose between
Kate Croy and Milly Theale ; in The Awkward Age , Van
has to decide whether he will marry Nanda to please old
Mr. Longdon and to advance his own interests, or not.
In both the dehcate niceties of conscience and honour are
stressed — the individual conscience, it is important to note,
and the individual responsibilities (witness for example
Kate Croy’s compact with Densher). In The Awkward
Age, Nanda’s quivering but resolute abnegation of what
she might have — the half-loaf, the crumbs, of Van’s
affection — is the main thing. What is stressed is the
withdrawal from something which does not come up to
the individual’s standard of integrity, of fullness, even
although that something is not in itself undesirable. The
Wings of the Dove and The Awkward Age express indeed
the same equation in different terms ; what it is may best
be given in Henry James’ own words :

What I hate is myself— when I think that one has to take
so much, to be happy, out of the lives of others, and that
one isn’t happy even then. ... What it comes to is that it’s
not, it’s never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to take. The
only safe thing is to give. . . ^ (The Ambassadors.)

Renunciation of what one knows to be not fully con-
sonant with one’s integrity, then, is the very apparent
motif of these three books. The problem with which
Henry James is concerned is one of very delicately poised
behaviour, of very subtly adjusted moral standards. And
here we are only at the beginning of his art.

The renunciation in each case comes from a highly in-
telligent and complex personality, fully aware of what is
involved. It is no easy situation with which the Jamesian

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

character is confronted. Like Eliot, like Hopkins, James
knows that the only way for the mind to be free is to be
master of its desires, to control them by ceasing to have
them. The same essential theme underlies his novels as
that which underlies Eliot’s

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still,

and, though Hopkins indicates a very different method of
approach, the same problem is found in his central poems :

O in all that coil that toil since, seems, I kiss’d the rod.

Hand rather, my heart lo ! lapped strength, stole joy, would
laugh, cheer.

The triumph of individual integrity through intelligent
renunciation — let me stress the word intelligent. For it
is very noteworthy that the contrast between the subtle
spider-like spinning of complicated intertwined situation,
and the final severity and plainness of the character’s re-
sponse to the critical moment, is absolutely essential. The
complication, the intricacy of situation, is necessary to
reveal the importance, the value of the response.

This will emerge by a very simple comparison. In
Jane Austen, for example, the question of intricacy does
not arise. In showing the reactions of Wentworth and
Anne in Persuasion, in the admirable accurate description
of Anne’s feelings in the concert room, Jane Austen has
merely to state a certain series of simple observed facts.
A perfectly clear and just account of what happens is
given — the superficial actions are described, and one says,
Yes, she is feeling, and feeling intensely.

James is concerned with characters who are much more

16

HENRY JAMES

critically aware of their own responses, and much more
capable of subtle analysis. The interest lies in the analysis
almost more than in the first feeling — in the half-shades,
the fleeting glimpses of intention and attitude which can
never quite be brought out in their full complexity.
Generally in James’ work, the motive behind action is
exceedingly subtle, as in life, and requires to be analysed
before it can be evaluated.

3

A somewhat detailed analysis of The Golden Bowl may
perhaps afford the best instance of what one might call
the integrity which James stresses, and also of the com-
plications which it involves.

Prince Amerigo, a young impoverished Italian noble-
man, marries for the sake of rehabilitating his family for-
tunes, the wealthy and beautiful Maggie Verver, daughter
of Adam Verver an American millionaire. It is on
Amerigo’s side a marriage de convenance , helped by the
fact that he likes and respects his wife though he isn’t in
love with her. Indeed how could he be, when he is very
deeply in love with Charlotte Stanton, as she is with him ;
whom he would have married but for the fact that — in
that disinterested and critical way in which Henry James’
characters can look on themselves — they both agree that
it would be impossible owing to their poverty.

Charlotte, who is a great friend of Maggie’s, has been
in America but comes over to England in time for the
marriage. She and Amerigo, who both have an extra-
ordinary sense of the obligations laid on them by

17

6

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEt

Amerigo’s marriage, steal a last morning together before
parting, ostensibly so that Charlotte can buy a wedding-
present. They go into a small shop, at the end of a long
search, and Charlotte is attracted by a very beautiful
crystal bowl, of a gold colour and most exquisite pro-
portions but with an infinitesimal flaw m its structure.

“Does one make a present” (she asks the shopkeeper)
“of an object that contams, to one’s knowledge, a flaw?”

“Well, if one knows of it one has only to mention it. . . .
The good faith,” the man smiled, “is always there.”

“And leave the person to whom one gives the thing, you
mean, to discover it ?”

“He wouldn’t discover it, if you’re speaking of a
gentleman.”

And again,

“Does crystal then break — when it is crystal ? I thought
its beauty was its hardness.”

Her friend in his way discriminated. “Its beauty is its
being crystal. But its hardness is certainly its safety. It
doesn’t break,” he went on, “like vile glass. It sphts — if
there is a split.”

All this is highly symbolical of the general situation, and
the image is developed later, as we shall see.

Maggie and the Prince marry: the Prince and her
father bound Maggie’s horizon. Old Adam Verver be-
gins to wonder, in the hypersensitive fashion of James’
characters, whether he had not better marry Charlotte, in
order to prevent Maggie — a most devoted daughter —
from feeling that by her marriage she has deserted him.
Maggie realizes nothing about the Prince’s attitude to
Charlotte ; nor at this point, we assume, does her father.

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HENRY JAMES

He has his 4 4 grand idea 5 5 apparently only on his daughter’s
behalf.

One cannot at the time quite accept this, qua character.
The devotion and the remedy seem disproportionate to
fact. We know that Maggie is as yet untroubled by any-
thing except her father’s loneliness. Is it certain that her
father is as unaware ? That question shifts the balance of
attention, but we don’t as yet know the answer. It is
impossible from the data given by James to form a de-
finite reply — it is his method indeed of keeping the situa-
tion freshly before us, of making us realize that there are
undercurrents of fears and suspicions, of alterations and
adjustments beneath the apparently calm surface.

Charlotte marries Adam, and the situation becomes
doubly complicated as the two families are constantly
with each other. Maggie and her father show their de-
votion to each other ; Charlotte and the Prince conceal
their mutual passion. They vow indeed to treat their
respective spouses with a care and tenderness superlative.
They agree that, being people of honour, they can trust
each other :

“It’s all too wonderful.”

Firmly and gravely she kept his hand. “It’s too beauti-
ful.” And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly
held and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier
past even had seen them. They were silent at first, only
facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting
and met. “It’s sacred,” he said at last.

“It’s sacred,” she breathed back at him. They vowed it,
gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more
closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened
circle as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond,

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL*

everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and
mingled. Their bps sought their bps, their pressure their
response and their response their pressure ; with a violence
that had sighed itself the next moment to die longest and
deepest of stillnesses diey passionately sealed their pledge.

After this, of course, the reader knows where he stands.
The only person who doesn’t know, who remains
radiantly confident and happy, is Maggie. But one day
she sees in the same shop-window the same golden bowl
— and buys it as a present for her father. The shopman
comes to tell her that it is cracked (he is certainly not a
person of the real world) and innocently relates the visit
he had had from the other two prospective buyers, and
how their words and attitude to each other had impressed
his memory with their obvious infatuation. Incidentally
he hopes she has not yet bestowed the crystal bowl, “for,”
he says, “it wasn’t a thing for a present to a person she
was fond of, for she wouldn’t wish to give a present that
would bring ill-luck.” The symbolism is again clear;
the cracked bowl represents at once the crack in Maggie’s
faith.

Maggie is now in full possession of the situation — she
immediately remembers vague hints, actions, words,
which had passed unheeded by her before, and now come
home with dreadful force. She puts the bowl on her
mantelpiece ; one Mrs. Assingham who throughout the
book has acted as intimate observer of the situation happens
to visit Maggie at this point, and hears all. She takes the
bowl in her hand and deliberately dashes it on the floor.

“Whatever you meant by it — and I don’t want to know
now — has ceased to exist,” Mrs. Assingham said.

20

HENRY JAMES

It is important to note here how in most of Henry
James’ books the presence of a detached observer is ne-
cessary, who looks on at the central situation and who by
reason of his or her “ beautiful intelligence,” sorts out the
significant fragments and puts them dexterously before
the astonished and fascinated eyes of the reader. Mrs.
Assingham in this novel, Davey Bradham in The Ivory
Tower , Strether in The Ambassadors , Mr. Longdon in
The Awkward Age , all are there in order to make aware-
ness more aware, to reveal the growing situation in the
clearest possible light. In this respect, Henry James is far
behind the method of his closest disciple, Virginia Woolf,
who has managed finally to eKminate the observer. It is
interesting to reflect that that is a feat, for the psycho-
logical novel. Dorothy Richardson eliminates the ob-
server too, but often with disastrous results. Conrad who
was in a large part of his work impelled by the same
desire as James to show the

Bonds no man could unbind
Bemg imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind

(Yeats)

also has to use his device. In James’ own work I can only
think of two novels, The Sense of the Past and What
Maisie Knew (and possibly, though with some qualifica-
tions, Strether in The Ambassadors ), where the intelligent
observer is also the active participator in the drama, and
where the situation gradually unfolds to us through its
gradual unfolding in the mind of that person.

But to get back to The Golden BowL The crack is

21

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

apparent — the bowl is smashed. Will the relationship
between Maggie and Amerigo, between Amerigo and
Charlotte also be broken — that fine fabric which has been
woven with such infinite care and pains ? Maggie and
the Prince at least know that the situation between them
is new. That at least the breaking of the bowl has done.
The Prince finds it in fragments and Maggie tells him that
she knows of the situation between him and Charlotte.

It is precisely here, at the critical moment which has
been led up to with infinite care and patience, that James
shows his originality and his genius. Up till now, the
interest of the situation has been more in the manner of
treatment, in the fine shades of distinction drawn between
imagination and fact, than in its intrinsic importance.
For the situation per se is of course one that is very
familiar. It could be handled in the mood of comedy —
and one can imagine how a dramatist of the Restoration
period would have dealt with it — or in the mood of
tragedy. James does neither. In a sense his interest lies
in the social comedy, using the word in its Meredithian
connotation ; but he is more vitally concerned with the
response of character, with the civilized and completely
conscious reaction to the full situation. I should like to
emphasize these words — civilized and completely con-
scious.

In the first place, civilized. Life goes on ; there is no
passionate Othello-like reaction. Maggie and the Prince
know ; Charlotte suspects that Maggie knows ; Maggie
suspects that her father knows. Nothing is definitely said.
The situation is apparently to go on, without comment
and without reproach on either side. Maggie suffers, be-
22

HENRY JAMES

cause for her the world is wrecked by her discovery, but
she suffers in silence. One evening at their country-house
she paces the terrace outside while the others play bridge
indoors :

She continued to walk and continued to pause; she
stopped afresh for the look into the smoking-room, and by
this time . . . she saw as in a picture . . . why it was she had
been able to give herself so little, from the first, to the vulgar
heat of her wrong. She might fairly as she watched them,
have missed it as a lost thing ; have yearned for it, for the
straight vindictive view, the rights of resentment, the rages
of jealousy, the tempests of passion, as for something she
had been cheated of not least; a range of feelings which for
many women would have meant so much, but which for
her husband’s wife, for her father’s daughter figured nothing
nearer to experience than a wild eastern caravan, looming
into view with crude colours in the sun, fierce pipes in the
air, high spears against the sky, all a thrill, a natural joy to
mingle with, but turning off short before it reached her and
plunging mto other defiles. ... It was extraordinary, they
(the group playing inside) positively brought home to her
that to feel about them in any of the immediate, inevitable,
assuaging ways, the ways usually open to innocence out-
raged and generosity betrayed, would have been to give
them up, and that giving them up, was, marvellously, not
to be thought of.

It is just here that James shows his originality — his
characters behave not in the way that one expects they
would in a heightened situation — that is to say, there
seems to be no impulsive, instinctive, and above all, no
violent reaction. But they do behave as perfectly civilized
people really would. Their responses are controlled all
the time by the mind, it is true— James does not show us

23

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL'

what happens when the mind is not so controlled. But,
and equally importantly, the emotion is controlled —
that is, it does exist and to a great degree. Maggie
deliberately controls her feelings, refuses to act on im-
pulse, for fear of disturbing the tremulous and delicate
situation too roughly. She will not allow herself to suc-
sumb to her love for Amerigo because of her complete
awareness that to do so would be to falsify the situation ;
that the only method of attaining any right issue is to
stand back, not to interfere, in fact, to sacrifice.

In The Sense of the Past (to digress for a little), one of
the two unfinished novels which James wrote, his last
work, in 19x5, there is a sentence which might stand as a
motto for his work, and which throws more light on the
connection between feeling and intellect in the novels.
Ralph Pendrel, a young American who comes to Europe
with a deep sense of its traditions, finds himself (it is a
fantastic symbolic situation) actually taking the part of
one of his ancestors and living in the past, with a group
of people who take him to belong to their own time,
while he is conscious both of their pastness, his con-
temporaneity with them, and at the same time his own
modernity. He is involved in a queer situation, for his
interlocutors appear to recognize that there is something
strange about him in spite of his apparent conformity, and
he realizes that the end will probably be disastrous — he
faces this because, as James puts it, “he had come . . . out
for nothing singly and solely . . . (but) the whole, the
finest integrity of the thing.”

The book is unfinished ; it is indeed practically only
begun ; but in the notes Henry James has given us a full

24

HENRY JAMES

indication of how it was to be worked out. Nan Mid-
more, the daughter of the house in the past into which
Ralph has stumbled, falls in love with him and he with
her. Ultimately the question of Ralph’s escape back into
his own world, the modem world, rests on Nan’s giving
him up. On this Henry James obviously meant the whole
plot to turn. 4 4 It is necessary,” he says in the notes, where
he is thinking out the novel (and anyone interested in his
method of putting the novel together cannot do better
than study the notes both in this and in the other novels),
“it is necessary that she shall know (Ralph’s situation)
... in order to ... do the particular thing that will act
for him (i.e. to assist and relieve him), and so bring the
whole situation to the point of its denouement. What is
then this particular thing ? . . . The thing is to keep hold
of the clue, as tight as possible, that I have grabbed for my
solution in the line of her making the sacrifice — making it
all with a sublime intelligence for him. . . . Isn’t there
something, isn’t there even much, in the idea that when
these two have arrived, so to speak, at their understanding
... he becomes capable of a sort of sublimity in her
presence ... so that there is a kind of struggle between
them as to who shall give up most — if I may put it in such
a way without excess of the kind of romanticism that I
don’t want. . . . What hovers before me at this pitch, as
I just said, is the “concetto” that, sincerely affected by her
sublimity, he is moved to match it — and in all sincerity
as I say — by offering to remain with her, as who should
say, give up everything for her — from the moment he thus
takes in that she gives him up for what is to herself utterly
nothing, nothing but the exaltation of sacrifice.”

25

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL '

The notion of renunciation here is plain enough. What
I want now to stress is the phrase “without excess of the
kind of romanticism I don’t want.” The danger Henry
James has to avoid, in his last novel as in his first, is not
that of dryness, of aridity, but of romantic excess, of
sentimentality. His method, his technique helps him to
avoid that — as he says when talking about working out
the Ralph Pendrel situation : “Here the very closest and
finest logic must govern all one’s sequences.” He avoids
the danger of reading too much emotion into the situa-
tion, perhaps (his detractors will say) by reading too much
awareness into the situation. But my point is that to react
against romantic feeling in this way is very different from
a complete absence of such feeling.

Let us now return to Maggie Verver, whom we left —
in order to vindicate the charge of lack of feeling in the
Jamesian character — passively contemplating the ruin of
her happiness. As the situation develops, there is an
extraordinarily delicate balancing of motive. Charlotte,
who suspects that Maggie is aware of what has passed
between Amerigo and herself but who does not know
positively, boldly asks her if she has offended in any way
for she has noticed a slight constraint. Maggie instead of
telling her the truth positively denies it. James makes it
amply clear why she lies, and this is extremely important
— if Charlotte does not know that Maggie knows, then
that can only mean that Amerigo has not told Charlotte
of the final development of the situation ; that is to say,
the primary position has been reversed — instead of acting
a part to Maggie while being completely in Charlotte’s
confidence, he is now acting a part to Charlotte in respect

2 6

HENRY JAMES

of a confidence which he and his wife share — the situation,
as it were, follows with a logical consistency of emotion.
To quote :

“He must have had his own difficulty about it” (reasons
Maggie), and she was not, after all, falling below him. . . .
He had given her something to conform to, and she hadn’t
unintelhgently turned on him, “gone back on him,” as he
would have said, by not conforming. They were together,
he and she, close, close together — whereas Charlotte, though
rising there radiantly before her, was really off in some dark-
ness of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her
with care. The heart of the Princess swelled, accordingly,
even in her abasement ; she had kept in tune with the right,
and something, certainly, something that might be like a
rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and
possibly soon, come of it for her. The right, the right —
yes, it took tins extraordinary form of her humbugging, as
she had called it, to the end. It was only a question of not,
by a hair’s-breadth, deflecting into the truth.

An astonishing statement, but one that is implied, if
never stated again so clearly, in numerous instances. The
situation in The Wings of the Dove, for instance, between
Kate Croy, Milly Theale, and Merton Densher, is a fairly
parallel one, where Milly Theale’s reaction to her cir-
cumstance might be compared with Maggie’s. Em-
phatically again the same attitude is taken in What Maisie
Knew , a book where James’ interest in form is perhaps at
its height — each moment in the tale is logically pro-
gressive from the preceding one, and it moves forward
with the utmost precision and economy. There is an
extraordinarily skilful pattern of successive relationships,
which could be represented as successive stages in the

27

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL '

manipulation of a set of algebraic equations. There is, as
it were, an increasing complexity of brackets within
brackets, but behind the almost impossible intricacy, there
lies concealed a solution in terms of a single constant. In
this tale, where one is tempted at first sight to say that
the interest is almost solely in the intricacies of pattern,
what emerges — and emerges with triumphant force — is
again this queer kind ofjamesian integrity, which depends
on renunciation. This integrity is very rarely, in the
novels, concerned with literal truth of fact or statement,
and never concerned with ordinary conventional values.
The Jamesian character is not interested in literal truth ;
but in a kind of absolute value, a value which can only be
arrived at by a full and clear intelligence of everything
involved. Renunciation, integrity, awareness are the three
key-words for Henry James’ work, and all are closely
linked together.

In The Golden Bowl, for example, Maggie’s passivity of
action and silence makes her a force to be reckoned with,
an admirable force. We are left at the end with no doubt
as to the Prince’s feeling for his wife ; we are left with a
hopeful remark about Adam’s for Charlotte. The situa-
tion, as James might have said, has ended beautifully — it
has been like an involved arrangement of pieces of a
puzzle, and when the right pieces are put together, what
happens? Well, nothing but the most admirable re-
adjustment happens, provided everyone keeps his integ-
rity. That of course is of the highest importance. There
is nothing more striking than James’ insistence that the
responsibility for the individual’s fate lies with the indivi-
dual. Each man must act according to his own way.

28

HENRY JAMES

Maggie’s silence shows this, as much as it does her
generosity. Charlotte will act according to her own
laws ; all Maggie can do is to help her do this.

The Golden Bowl indeed shows James’ prepossessions
with extreme clarity. On the one hand Maggie and
Adam, dis-interested, un-selfish, integer characters; on
the other the Prince and Charlotte. Each pair has a cer-
tain nobility — that is where the subtle discrimination of
James’ art, the finesse of his touch, is seen. In the case of
the father and daughter the nobility manifests itself ne-
gatively, in sacrifice. On the other hand Charlotte and
the Prince have a certain active beauty, which James
recognizes to the full. The Prince however also knows
the value of sacrifice — he does not withdraw from Char-
lotte but holds in loyalty to that relation ; he does not,
in other words, sacrifice her to himself. It is curious that
the three who know what sacrifice is, should be those to
attain harmony, and that Charlotte’s great moment comes
when she too resolutely accepts her sacrifice, and with-
draws with Adam.

And now finally to indicate how awareness is essen-
tially bound up with this notion of integrity. In the notes
to The Ivory Tower , his last and unfinished work, and one
which perhaps brings out the point most clearly, though all
the novels do both implicidy and expressly, in the notes,
James, talking of his principal character Gray Fielder, says :

All of this makes him, I of course desperately realize,
another of the “intelligent,” another exposed and assaulted,
active and “passive ” mind, engaged in an adventure, and
interesting in itself by so being ; but I rejoice in that aspect
of my material as dramatically and determinantly general

29

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL'

It isn’t centrally a drama of fools and vulgarians ; it’s only
circumferentially and surroundedly so.

Another of the intelligent, another exposed and assaulted
mind. Significant words. To what is Gray Fielder ex-
posed and assaulted ? He is a young man who falls heir
to an immense fortune in America, a fortune amassed by
an uncle who has been interested in nothing in his life
except material gain, and who deliberately makes his
nephew his sole heir because Gray is not so interested,
because his values are the inner values of integrity. Gray’s
friend Rosanna Gaw (James’ names are always odd) has
been left a fortune by her narrow-minded rather un-
pleasant parent. Gray and Rosanna are the people who
are aware that there is something more in the world than
grab, than personal gratification. On the other hand are
Horton Vint and Cissy Foy who are grasping, scheming,
self-interested. Both have designs on their friends Gray
and Rosanna. Horton wants to marry Rosanna, Cissy,
Gray, in order to gain for themselves the advantages of
wealth — to gain for themselves and each other, for
Horton and Cissy are in love (The resemblance to the
Charlotte — Amerigo — Maggie situation is plain). One
of the most interesting and characteristic passages in the
book occurs where Horton and Cissy discuss the possi-
bilities of Cissy’s marrying Gray :

“There’s one thing at any rate I’ll be hanged if I shall
allow,” he wound up. . . . “He shan’t become if I can help
it as beastly vulgar as die rest of us.”

The thing was said with a fine sincere ring, but it drew
from Cissy a kind of quick wail of pain. “Oh, oh, oh —
what a monstrous idea . . . that he possibly could, ever !”

HENRY JAMES

It had an immediate, even a remarkable effect ; it made
him turn at once to look at her, giving his lightest pleasantest
laugh. . . . Then it made him, with a change of posture,
shift his seat sufficiently nearer to her to put his arm round
her altogether and hold her close, pressing his cheek a
moment, with due precautions, against her hair. ‘‘That s
awfully nice of you. We will pull something off. Is what
you’re thinking of what your fnend out there dans le temps ,
the stepfather, Mr. Wendover, was it ? told you about him
in that grand manner ? ”

“Of course it is,” said Cissy in lucid surrender and as if
this truth were of a harness almost to blush for. “Don’t you
know I fell so in love with Mr. Northover, whose name you
mispronounce, that I’ve kept true to him for ever, and
haven’t been really in love with you in the least, and shall
never be with Gray himself, however much I may want to,
or you perhaps may even try to make me i — any more than
I shall ever be wuth anyone else ! . . .”

“I see, I see.” It made Horton, for reasons, hold her but
the closer — yet not withal as if prompted by her remarks to
affectionate levity. It was a sign of the mtercourse of this
pair that, move each other as they might to further affection,
and therewith on occasion to a congruous gaiety, they
treated no cause and no effect of that sort as waste ; they had
somehow already so worked off, in their common interest,
all possible mistakes and vain imaginings, all false starts and
false pursuits, all failures of unanimity. “Why then if he’s
really so decent, not to say so superior,” (Horton) went on,
“won’t it be the best thing in the world and a great sim-
plification for you to fall — that is for you to be — m love
with him ? That will be better for me, you know, than if
you’re not ; for it’s the impression evidendy made on you
by the late Northover that keeps disturbing my peace of
mind. I feel, though I can’t quite tell you why,” he ex-
plained, “that I’m never going to be in the least jealous of
Gray and probably not even so much as envious ; so there’s

31

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

your chance — take advantage of it all the way. Like him
at your ease, my dear, and God send he shall like you!
Only be sure it’s for himself you do it — and for your own
self ; as you make out your possibilities, de part et £ autre, on
your getting nearer to them.”

“So as to be sure, you mean,” Cissy enquired, “of not
liking him for his money ?”

He waited a moment, and if she had not immediately
after her words sighed, “Oh dear, oh dear!” in quite
another, that is a much more serious, key, the appearance
would perhaps have been that for once in a blue moon she
had put into his mind a thought he couldn’t have. He
couldn’t have the thought that it was of the least importance
she should guard herself in the way mentioned ; and it was
in the air, the very next thing, that she couldn’t so idiotically
have strayed as to mean to impute it. He quickly enough
made the point that . . . The late Northover had clearly had
something about him that it worried a fellow to have her
perpetually rake up. There she was m peril of jealousy —
his jealousy of the queer Northover ghost. ... He could
look after her with Gray — they were at one about Gray ;
what would truly alienate them, should she persist, would
be his own exposure to comparison with the memory of a
rococo Briton he had no arms to combat. Which extra-
vagance of fancy had of course after a minute sufficiently
testified to the clearance of their common air that invariably
sprang from their feeling themselves again together and
finding once more what this came to — all under sublime
capability of proof. The renewed consciousness did per-
haps nothing for their difficulties as such, but it did every-
thing for the interest, the amusement, the immediate
inspiration of their facing them : there was in that such an
element of their facing each other and knowing, each time
as if they had not known it before, that this had absolute
beauty.

The interest of that passage lies in two things — in the

32

HENRY JAMES

first place, it emphasizes the awareness which James wishes
to stress ; they rely for complete understanding on what
is not said, taking the “beautiful intelligence” of each
other for granted, so much so that here what they mean
is actually the reverse of what they say ; but no mistake is
made by either as to their purpose. Secondly, it brings
out the fact that the conflict between the two pairs of
characters, between Horton and Cissy on the one hand,
and Gray and Rosanna on the other, is not one crudely
between good and evil, but between extremely finely
organized intelligence with no sense of integrity, and ex-
tremely finely organized intelligence plus a sense of in-
tegrity. It is almost a duel of wits (and this is merely to
point to a remarkably clear statement of what happens in
all the novels).

In this case the plot centres (or would have centred, if
finished) round the fact that Horton who acts as steward
of Gray’s money, defrauds him of it, and Gray, in accord-
ance with the Jamesian tradition, knows that he does so,
but takes no action, in fact ignores it. James’ own re-
marks on this are illuminating :

When the first definite question begins to glimmer upon
Gray ... as to what Horton is really doing with him, and as
to whether or no he shall really try to find out. That
question of whether or no he shall becomes the question.
. . . The process of confrontation, reflection, resolution that
ensues (on his knowledge), it is this that brings me up to my
high point of beautiful difficulty and clarity.

And the “high point” is further explained :

The way in which the standing off from sharp or supreme
clearances is, and confirms itself as being, a note of my hero’s

33

c

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

action in the matter. . . . No end, I think, to be got out of
this wondrous fact of Gray’s sparing Horton, or saving him,
the putting of anything to a real or direct test.

This attitude of course is comparable to Maggie’s in
The Golden Bowl, to Strether’s in The Ambassadors, to
Milly Theale’s in The Wings of the Dove. The end, al-
though the tale is unfinished, is of course inevitable.
Gray will triumph, as in their different ways, Maggie,
Strether, Milly Theale triumph. At first sight, this may
look like a concession to sentiment on James’ part.
Actually it isn’t so. It is a curious kind of negative
triumph — but none the less real. “Not, out of the whole
affair, to have got anything for myself,” says Strether.
Continually, as Theodora Bosanquet well says of him,
continually, in fife, “wherever he iooked he saw fineness
apparently sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth
to a bold front ; in the novels too, fineness is apparendy
sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth to a bold
front.” But that is only half the question. The ultimate
value, he knew, was not in the appearance, and out of
intelligent sacrifice, emerges integrity, harmony, rightness.
Intelligence is necessary. In a note to The Ivory Tower,
James talks about the interest of the situation between
Gray and Cissy — “the fascination,” he calls it, “of the
state of vigilance, the wavering equilibrium, at work.” An
extraordinarily interesting phrase, anticipating, in another
field, Dr. Richards’ remarks on “vigilance” in criticism.

Let me remind you of them. In Principles of Literary
Criticism, he says :

In a high state of vigilance the nervous system reacts to
stimuli with highly adapted, discriminating and ordered

34

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and circumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or
complexity it may display, with as little mixture of die alien
and external as possible ?”

Further, the book is obviously an important document
in contemporary literary history. Unmistakeably, here,
a voice of the same age is speaking as that which is heard
in The Waste Land , and there are Ehotian references
throughout. When Bernard says :

“For this is not one life ; nor do I always know if I am
man or woman, Bernard, or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny,
or Rhoda — so strange is the contact of one with another’ 7 —

we are reminded of T. S. Eliot’s Tiresias. The actual
verbal reminiscence is at times striking ; for example, the
analogy between Bernard’s :

“Now the meal is finished; we are surrounded by

peelings and breadcrumbs Is it Paris, is it London where

we sit, or some Southern city of pink-washed houses lying
under cypresses, under high mountains, where eagles soar ?*’

and the “Where are the eagles and the trumpets?” of
A Cooking Egg is too close to be undeliberated. There is,
too, something of the same juxtaposition of the trivial
and the tragic, of beauty and horror, in this book as
in The Waste Land .

Yet, somehow, the result is not entirely satisfactory.
The Waves is a book which raises many questions, notably
those asked in To the Lighthouse — What is life ? Whatis
art ? An answer is indeed indicated in the last chapter,
but with a strange distrust. More than any other, this
novel makes one wonder whether, without “beliefs” of
some kind the emotion in a work will not seem forced.

63

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

One cannot, of course, ask the poet or novelist for specific
moral sanctions ; the artist’s concern, like the scientist’s,
is in the experience — here is the actual experience ; this
is what it is, he says, and need say no more. But art is
always straying over into life, and The Waves raises un-
grateful questions. It leaves one with a curious sense of
barrenness, in spite of some exquisite moments. Why
this should be so may come out by a comparison of the
passage quoted from To the Lighthouse (on p. 53) with
the passage at the end of The Waves where Bernard
suddenly feels the meaninglessness of life and after-
wards the renewal of it, both apparently from entirely
arbitrary causes :

Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows
Monday; Wednesday, Tuesday. Each spreads the same
ripple. The being grows rings, like a tree. Like a tree,
leaves fall.

For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the
rhythm stopped ; the rhymes and the humming, the non-
sense and the poetry. A space was cleared m my mind. I
saw through the thick leaves of habit. ... I waited. I
listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a
sudden sense of complete desertion. Now there is nothing.
No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has
destroyed me. . . .

The scene beneath me withered. . . . The woods had
vanished ; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound
broke the silence of the wintry landscape. No cock crowed ;
no smoke rose ; no train moved. A man without a self, I
said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man. With
dispassionate despair, with entire disillusionment, I sur-
veyed the dust dance ; my life, my friend’s lives. . . .
How can I proceed now, I said, without a self, weightless

64

VIRGINIA WOOLF

and visionless, through a world weightless and without
illusion ?

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse
of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It
hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny
jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun.
Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once,
twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone
walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith.
The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields
drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue
light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drink-
ing water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pen-
dent ; settles and swings beneath our feet.

So the landscape returned to me ; so I saw fields rolling

in waves of colour beneath me Loveliness returns as one

looks, with all its tram of phantom phrases. One breathes
in and out substantial breath ; down in the valley the tram
draws across the fields lop-eared with smoke.

Compare with this the dinner-party passage in To the
Lighthouse , where a similar experience of sudden loss and
sudden recovery of value is given. I think it is true to
say that in To the Lighthouse the mood depends for its
value on the human element of pity, sympathy, and so
on. (Compare for the same sort of emphasis the account
of Lily Briscoe’s vision of Mrs. Ramsay.) Here the mood
is almost completely arbitrary, and arises and dissipates
for no particular reason. Wordsworth’s miraculous little
poem, “At the Comer of Wood Street,” ends thus :

She looks and her heart is in Heaven ; but they fade.

The mist and the river, the hill and the shade ;

The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,

And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.

65

E

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEE

The effect of those lines, and especially of the last two
where the feeling both of effort and of the slipping and
vanishing of colour are given by the movement of the
rhythm, is re-inforced by, if it does not ultimately depend
on, the fact that it arises from the human basis of regret
for something lovely or longed-for, vanished. In Virginia
Woolf’s exquisite description of the re-birth of colour
there is no particular emotional justification as a basis for
the experience. The experience as it were springs out of
the air — it is a phenomenon of a momentary emotion,
and interesting ; but (to use a phrase of Eliot’s perhaps
already too much worn) it has no “tentacular roots” like
the other has. The criticism which one apphed to Jacob’s
Room, that there seemed to be no complete emotional
validity in it, might also be apphed to The Waves, in
spite of the extremely sensitive and delicate understanding
of particular moods revealed in it.

To sum up, in Virginia Woolf’s work there is both an
exceedingly delicate sensibility to impressions and a
critical intelligence sufficiently in control to order the
multiplicity of impressions into an artistic unity. The
advantages of her subtle method is that it comes closer
and closer to the actual experience ; the danger is that it
may, as I think it does in The Waves, cause the experience
to assume more significance than it actually holds. There
is also the danger of completion. For once this method
is_perfected, there only remains to record, and the record
of any one person, however sensitive, must be limited to
the consciousness of his consciousness.

The instrument of communication in this case is per-
fect. There only remains to decide whether in E. M.
66

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Forster’s phrase, “it is impossible for the instrument of
contemplation to contemplate itself; perhaps if it is
possible it means the end of imaginative literature,” and
secondly, what Virginia Woolf herself says in an essay :

From what . . . arises that sense of security which gradu-
ally, delightfully, and completely overcomes us ? It is the
power of their belief-— their conviction, that imposes itself
upon us. In Wordsworth, the philosophic poet, this is
obvious enough. But in both (Scott and Jane Austen)
there is the same natural conviction that life is of a certain
quality. They have their judgment of conduct. They
know the relations of human beings towards each other and
towards the universe. Neither of them probably has a word
to say about the matter outright, but everything depends
on it. Only believe, we find ourselves saying, and all the
rest will come of itself. . . .

So then our contemporaries afflict us because they have
ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell
us what it is that happens to himself. ... Set down at a fresh
angle of the eternal prospect they can only whip out their
notebooks and record with agonized intensity the flying
gleams, which light on what ? and the transitory splendours
which may, perhaps, compose nothing whatever.

It is curious that Virginia Woolf, who exemplifies how
far the instrument of contemplation can contemplate
itself, should also raise, and raise very strongly, the second
question.

67

E. M. FORSTER

Ip with Henry James one leaps from the 70’s to the most
complete modernism, with E. M. Forster one has at first
at any rate to proceed backwards. Forster’s early writings
"clearly owe a great deal to Meredith) although eventually
he goes very far beyond the limits of the Meredithian
theme. But the early influence is interesting to see,
particularly because it helps to make clear the character-
istic and individual attitude which emerges in the later
novels.

Forster himself makes explicit reference to Meredith in
Aspects of the Novel, the published version of lectures given
a few years ago at Cambridge . . . “Meredith is not (now)
the great name he was twenty or thirty years ago, when
much of the Universe and all Cambridge trembled”—
that is to say about the time when Forster’s own first
works (Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey)
were appearing. And he goes on, in a slightly derogatory
way — “His philosophy has not worn well. His heavy
attacks on sentimentality — they bore the present genera-
tion, which pursues the same quarry, but with neater
instruments, and is apt to suspect anyone carrying a
blunderbuss of being a sentimentalist himself.” A neat
statement ; but the charge of sentimentality might equally
be made against part of Forster’s own work — in The

6 8

E. M. FORSTER

Longest Journey , for example ; although certainly Forster
in the main is of the modem generation in this respect,
that he pursues the same quarry, but with neater
instruments.”

In A Room ivith a View Forster makes an explicit refer- *•
ence to Meredith which it is impossible to ignore. Cecil
Vyse, the staid and unimaginative fiance of Lucy, brings
to their comer of the world two people with whom Lucy
has had an adventure in Italy, as a kind of practical joke,
a joke which ironically turns on him. When he tells
Lucy that the Emersons are coming, he says :

I, even I, have won a great victory for the Comic Muse.
George Meredith’s right — the cause of Comedy and the
cause of Truth are really the same.

Again, when old Mr. Emerson sets forth his view's in
reply to a casual remark made by one of the party of
young people he meets when they are going to bathe :

1 “And yet you will tell me the sexes are equal ?”

“I tell you that they shall be,” said Mr. Emerson, who
had been slowly descending the stairs. “Good afternoon,
Mr. Beebe. I tell you they shall be comrades. ...”

“We are to raise ladies to our level?” the clergyman
enquired.

“The garden of Eden,” pursued Mr. Emerson, still de-
scending, “which you place in the past, is really yet to come.
We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies.”

Mr. Beebe disclaimed placing the Garden of Eden any-
where.

“In this — not in other things — we men are ahead. We
despise the body less than women do. But not until we are
comrades shall we enter the garden.”

1 One should remember that this was written in 1909.

69

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

“I say, what about this bathe,” murmured Freddy,
appalled at the mass of philosophy that was approaching
him.

“I believed in a return to Nature once. But how can we
return to Nature when we have never been with her?
Today, I believe that we must discover Nature. After
many conquests we shall attain simplicity. It is our
heritage.”

In spite of the amusingly flippant tone, it is impossible
not to feel that Forster is here in direct sympathy with
Meredith’s remark in the Essay on Comedy :

There never will be civilization where Comedy is not poss-
ible, and that comes of some degree of.social equality of the
, sexes'. . . where women are on the road to an equal footing
with men, in attainments and in liberty — in what they have
won for themselves, and what has been granted them by a
fair civilization — there . . . pure comedy flourishes.

Yet a third point of resemblance — and the most im-
portant — is in Forster ^attitude to Nature! It comes out
of course in the last part of the extract already quoted, and
most of the short stories in the early collection The
Celestial Omnibus, bring it out — for example The Story of
a Panic or the one called Other Kingdom. In these he is
not merely retelling a classical legend in a modem back-
ground. The tale of the boy who has been touched by
Pan, the girl who vanishes into a wood to escape the
possessive hand of the materialist, express in symbol some-
thing which underlies a great deal of Forster’s work.

In a sense he is, like Meredith'^ happy pagan, believing
in the freedom and solid goodness of earth, of th ematural
life ; but — and much more important — his paganism is

70

E. M. FORSTER

definitely stressed as against other qualities which the
civilized world possesses and which seem to be definitely
inhibiting or destructive. In this he is perhaps as near
D. H. Lawrence as Meredith, and D. H. Lawrence is a ,
writer from whom Forster is not so far away as critics
would have us believe.

The Story of the Siren (published in The Eternal Moment ,
a not very good collection of short stories, most of them
open to the charge of sentimentality) brings out this point
very clearly.

It is much the same kind of semi-supernatural tale as
those that appear in the collection called The Celestial
Omnibus ; it is told as reported by an Italian peasant, a
fisherman who recounts a legend of the coast. The sea,
he says, is the home of a siren of incredible beauty, and
some people who have dived deep have been lucky
enough to see her. Thereafter they are good for nothing
in the world, and are as though possessed — but possessed
of some secret which makes ordinary life nonsensical.
The fisherman’s brother is one of those who had seen the
siren, and who is thus transformed. He hears of a girl to
whom the same thing has happened; they marry, are
extremely happy ; she is about to have a child. At this
the superstitious villagers are alarmed. They think some
great disaster will happen when the child of two such
people is bom. As the fisherman puts it :

The siren will then rise from the sea, and destroy silShce,
and save the world.

The priest of the village, to whom all this belief in the
siren is absurd, but at the same time frightening, meets the

7i

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

girl walking by the cliff-edge and causes her to stumble
and fall into the sea to drown. That is all. But it gives
occasion for two remarks in the course of the narrative
which are significant for our purpose. The first comes
when the fisherman curses the religion which seems to
have caused all the misery :

He cursed the priests, the lying filthy cheating immoral
priests who had ruined his life. . . . “Thus are we tricked/’
was his cry, and he stood up and kicked at the azure ripples
with his feet, till he had obscured them with a cloud of sand.

The second remark comes at the very end of the story,
and is of the same kind. Forster has heard him and is
ruminating on what he has heard :

I heard him say, “Silence and loneliness cannot last for
ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years but the sea
lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing.” I would
have asked him more, but at that moment the whole cave
darkened, and there rode in through its narrow entrance the
returning boat.

These are of course symbolical statements — “He kicked
at the azure ripples with his feet, until he had obscured
them with a cloud of sand ” ; “At that moment the whole
cave darkened, and there rode in through its narrow
entrance the returning boat” — it is Forster’s method —
a subtle one — of interposing a personal comment. The
priests confuse the truth, the shining truth with their
dusty dry beliefs ;(piodem civilization darkens the pagan
vision which might otherwise have been illuminating^
The same attitude comes out extremely clearly in
A Room with a View , in some of old Mr. Emerson s re-

73

E. M. FORSTER

marks. Mr. Emerson is a childlike old man who has a
few simple beliefs in beauty and kindness and who dis-
regards or over-rides the conventions, filling the rooms
of people whom he does not know with violets, insisting
that the newcomers to the Italian pension shall have his
room because it has a view, instead of their own which
looks out on a blank wall — he is obviously a trouble to
the conventionally minded. A clergyman m the Italian
party has warned Lucy against him and says that he
“practically murdered his wife in the sight of God.”
Later in the story Lucy meets Mr. Emerson when his son
George is dangerously ill : He tells her that George “has
gone under — as his mother did.”

“But Mr. Emerson . . . what are you talking about ?”

“When I wouldn’t have George baptized,” said he. Lucy
was frightened.

“And she agreed that baptism was nothing, but he caught
that fever when he was twelve, and she turned round. She
thought it a judgment.” He shuddered. “Oh, horrible —
worst of all — worse than death, when you have made a
litde clearing in the wilderness, planted your ktde garden,
let in your sunlight, and then the weeds creep in again ! A
judgment ! And our boy had typhoid because no clergy-
man had dropped water on him m church. Is it possible,
Miss Honeychurch? . . . Shall we slip back mto the
darkness for ever ?”

“I don’t know,” gasped Lucy. “I don’t understand this
sort of thing. I was not meant to understand it.”

“But Mr. Eager [the clergyman who had told Lucy of
the “murder”] — he came when I was out, and acted
according to his principles. I don’t blame him or anyone
. . . but by the time George was well she was ill. He made
her think about sin and she went under thinking about it.”

73

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

It was thus that Mr. Emerson had murdered his wife in.
the sight of God.

“Oh, how terrible/’ said Lucy, forgetting her own affairs
at last.

“He was not baptized,” said the old man. “I did hold
firm.” And he looked with unwavering eyes at the rows of
books, as if— at what cost ! — he had won a victory over
them. “My boy shall go back to the earth untouched.”

There is no doubt that Forster means that paga nismi s
valuable . The further question is, what does he mean by
paganism ? Is it a convenient name for something more
intricate ? And this is where one comes to Forster’s own
contribution to the novel. /Tlis attitude to come dy, to the
necessity for^quahty (in the sense of companionship)
between men~and^v^ at first glance his attitude
towards Natur e — all seem Meredithian and derived J But
Forster’s own voice is heard unmistakeably developing the
theme, and finally going a long way beyond anything that
Meredith would have anticipated. This will be clearer lfwe
examine the three early novels in some detail, before going
on to a consideration of Howard’s End and A Passage to India ,
where his attitude has become modified to a large extent^

I

An examination of The Longest Journey brings out
Forster’s point of view most clearly. The “story” is
neither here nor there — it is a long leisurely somewhat
unwieldy and shapeless plot where we follow the chief
character Rickie from his undergraduate days at Cam-
bridge — and Forster has caught the atmosphere of Cam-
bridge better than anyone else has done, much better than

74

E. M. FORSTER

Virginia Woolf does in Jacob's Room — to his life as a
master at a small private school, unhappy marriage, and
sudden death while trying to save ids half-brother Stephen
from being killed by an oncoming train'.

Stephen is an important character — he is rough, un-
intellectual, countrified. He is the illegitimate son of
Rickie’s mother ; at first Rickie does not know of the
relationship ; when he does he is revolted, having cher-
ished the memory of his mother as something infinitely
pure and untouched ; then he tries to be kind to Stephen
for the sake of his mother’s memory. Stephen, being
robust emotionally, will not have this sham affection, and
the book turns on the rehabilitation of Rickie’s self-
respect when he begins to like Stephen for himself.
^Stephen is obviously, in Forster’s sense, pagan, with the
pagan virtues of honesty and impulsive action ; all that
he does he does from his whole self, unsuppressed. One
is asked to postulate here (as with Gino and George m the
later books) that in Stephen we have evidence of “ pure ”
feeling , in the chemical sense. It is a large assumption to
make, especially as the characters as such are not very
convincing, although they are obviously embodiments of
an attitude which Forster feels to be very valuable. He
is much happier with the group than with the individual*
— for example the superb description of the dining-room
of the pension Bertolini in A Room with a View — and for
this reason as a comic artist he is on sure ground. When
he touches the borderline of tragedy, as in this case, one
Hs just a little uncertain that the effect will not be melo-
dramatic. However, the main concern of the book is
symbolized in Rickie — he is represented as a person who

75

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL'

at first is on the side of freedom, of intellectual and
emotional honesty, who becomes involved in the con-
ventional response, the conventional attitude, and is
finally freed again through his meeting with Stephen.

As Rickie himself hovers between the two attitudes,
the emphasis falls very clearly where Forster wants it —
(£he contrast is continually stressed between th e kfe-of
earth, the lif e of intuition and reality, represented by
Stephen and Rickie’s mother ; and the lifLof co n vention^
of sham values, represented by Pembroke the 'school-
master, Mrs. Failing, and Rickie’s father) A very im-
portant point to notice is that Forster occasionally checks
the romantic feeling induced by the first attitude, by a
sort of acid sub-comment — for example the scene where
Rickie, after he and Stephen have broken free from the
Pembroke household, meditates peacefully in his aunt’s
drawing-room, secure in the consciousness of a new and
free existence. He feels renewed through contact with
Stephen’s life of impulse — the earth is good, the earth is
vital — “he knew that conventions are not majestic, and
that they will not claim us in the end.” As he muses thus,
one of his aunt’s priceless coffee-cups slips from his fingers
and breaks in pieces on the floor. “ This js Forster’s method
of ironic comment on his enthusiasm, It is a favourite
( method of his to combine intellectual detachment with
the mood of “inspiration” or belief, as though he dis-
^ trusted the imaginative vision at the same time as he
exhorts us to trust it. 1

1 A similar subtlety is seen in Mr. Myers’ The Root and the Flower.
One might take Forster and Myers as being symptomatic, in this
respect, of their time.

76

E. M. FORSTER

Later in the book, Rickie, going in search of Stephen,
finds that he has broken his promise and is roaring drunk,
which means for Rickie the collapse of the fine world
which they had meant to build up together :

" He leant against the parapet and prayed passionately, for
he knew that the conventions would claim him soon. God
was beyond them, but ah, how far beyond, and to be
reached after what degradation . . . (His vision) meant
nothing . . . they all meant nothing and were going nowhere,
the whole affair was a ridiculous dream.

Believing this, he saves Stephen in his drunkenness from
the oncoming train, and is killed himself. His last words
imply a complete revulsion from his narrowly gamed
standards of freedom, to all that he had previously thought
valueless, they are an admission of defeat.

The book, however, does not end there. 'The hfe of
earth in Stephen emerges triumphant by reason of Rickie’s
act. We are left with Stephen in complete harmony with
life, remembering Rickie with gratitude and love :

He had always been grateful, as people who understood
him knew. But this evening his gratitude seemed a gift of
small account. The ear was deaf and what thanks of his
could reach it ? The body was dust, and in what ecstasy of
his could it share ? The spirit had fled, in agony and loneli-
ness, never to know that it bequeathed him salvation. . . .
As he wondered, the silence of the night was broken. The
whisde of Mr. Pembroke’s tram came faintly and a lurid
spot passed over the land — passed and the silence returned.
One thing remained that a man of his sort might do. He
bent down reverently and saluted (his) child ; to whom he
had given the name of their mother.

Forster does not always make his attitude so clearly felt.

77

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

But here, remembering what Mr. Pembroke has repre-
sented all through the book — convention, rigidity of
mind, meanness — it is unmistakeable; “a lurid spot passed
over the land — passed and silence returned / 9 The life of
earth, the intuitive free.-honesf life remains

This contrast between the life of freedo m and the con -
ventio ns is brought out sharply in Where Angels Fear to
Tread , a novel which also gives a great deal of Forster's
very delicate comedy v Here the free life is represented by
the Italian Gino, the man who marries Lilia a rather
stupid Englishwoman, for her money, and thus rouses the
attention and displeasure of Lilia’s English relatives, who
come out to Italy after her death there in order to rescue
her child from his Italian father.

Gino symbolizes for Forster the(spirit of Italy^-as Philip
Herriton says when Lilia goes on her first journey there :

I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who
visit her. She is the school as well as the playground of the
world. . . . There was something half attractive, half repel-
lent, in the thought of this vulgar woman journeying to
places he loved and revered. Why should not she be
transfigured ? The same had happened to the Goths.

So the theme is set and from this the story develops.
Italy makes the barbarian Lilia marry the son of an
Italian dentist — unromantic enough. But from this all
the rest happens, including the spiritual regeneration of
Philip.

Ginp, then, the man who marries Lilia for her money,
the half-educated, uncultured, limited man, yet represents
the spirit of Italy^ He is cunning, avaricious, cruel, but
his feelings and motives are, like Stephen’s, "pure” (again

78 “

E. M. FORSTER

in the chemical sense). This is what differentiates him
sharply from the Herrito ns and their friend Miss-Ahbott,
who act as they do not from desire or conviction but
because they have accepted the fflnventio nal attitude ,
taken over the stock way of thinking. For example,
when Caroline Abbott interviews Gino to put before him
their proposal to take his child and Lilia’s back to England,
Gmo says that he won’t consent to part from his son :

“For they would separate us,” he added.

“HoW?”

“They would separate our thoughts.”

She was silent. This cruel, vicious father knew of strange
refinements. The hornble truth, that wicked people are
capable of love, stood naked before her, and her moral being
was abashed. It was her duty to rescue the baby, to save it
from contagion, and she still meant to do her duty. But
the comfortable sense of virtue left her. She was in the
presence of something greater than right or wrong.

Compare with tins the similar sentiment expressed in
The Longest Journey when Rickie at last realizes that a
sound relationship with Stephen is possible :

He believed that the earth had confirmed him. He stood
behind things at last, and knew that conventions are not
majestic, and that they will not claim us in the end.

Again, in Where Angels Fear to Tread , Forster openly
contrasts the two methods of existence, the conventional
and the free, by placing them side by side with m ironic
comment? Monteriano, where Gino lives, is thus des-
cribed as Philip approaches it :

As they climbed higher, the country opened out, and
79

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

there appeared high on a hill to the right, Monteriano. The
hazy green of the ohves rose up to its walls, and it seemed to
float in isolation between trees and sky, like some fantastic
ship city of a dream. Its colour was brown and it revealed
not a single house — nothing but the narrow circle of the
walls, and behind them seventeen towers — all that was left
of the fifty-two that had filled the city in her prime. Some
were only stumps, some were inclining stiffly to their fall,
some were still erect, piercing like masts into the blue. It
was impossible to praise it as beautiful, but it was also im-
possible to damn it as quaint.

f

The irrepressible Gino, in an act of gratuitous kindness,
had sent a picture postcard to Irma, Lilia’s child by a
former marriage, whom the Herritons are bringing up :

Irma collected picture postcards, and Mrs. Hernton or
Harriet always glanced first at all that came, lest the child
should get hold of something vulgar. On this occasion the
subject seemed perfectly inoffensive — a lot of ruined factory
chimneys — and Harriet was about to hand it to her niece
when her eye was caught by the words on the margin
(“View of the superb city of Monteriano — from your htel
brother”).

“A lot of ruined factory chimneys.” . . . “It seemed to
float in isolation between trees and sky, like some fantastic
ship city of a dream” — the two views are deliberately
opposed. Monteriano in the Herriton atmosphere is re-
duced to sordidness.

This is Forster’s favourite method of indicating his own
view. There is in his work an extremely subde and con-
stant j.ptt2£Q2iaQiLJl£L£g^ Sometimes the

mood of detachment, humour, or farce)is predominant,

80

E. M. FORSTER

as when the news of Lilia’s engagement comes to the
Herritons who are upset and cross :

Lunch was nasty ; and during pudding news arrived that
the cook, by sheer dexterity, had broken a very vital knob
off the kitchen range. “It is too bad,” said Mrs. Hernton.
Irma said it was three bad and was told not to be rude. “I
am going to the kitchen” (said Mrs. Herriton), “to speak
about the range.”

She spoke just too much, and the cook said that if she
could not give satisfaction she had better leave. A small
thing et hand is better than a great thing remote, and Lika,
misconducting herself upon a mountain in central Italy, was
immediately hidden.

Again, when the letter containing the news of Lilia’s
marriage arrives, Mrs. Herriton and Harriet are sowing
peas in the garden. They are thrown into agitation and
go into the house to make plans :

Just as she was going upstairs (that evening) she remem-
bered that she never covered up those peas. It upset her
more than anything, and again and again she struck the
hamsters with vexation. Late as it was, she got a lantern
from the toolshed and went down the garden to rake the
earth over them. The sparrows had taken every one. But
countless fragments of the letter remained, disfiguring the
tidy ground.

_Thus by two ironic comments, the value of the Lilia
situation to Mrs. Herriton is made plain — on a par with
trouble with the cook, and the interruption of good
gardening? But in Italy the situation is not so neatly dis-
posed of. It grows significant, until it involves anpitire
change of attitude on the part of two people^ Caroline
Abbott and Philip; and the death of the child about

81

F

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

whom the trouble arose. The world of these people will
never be the same again. Philip speaks :

As yet he could scarcely understand the thing. It was too
great. Round the Italian baby who had died in the mud
there centred deep passions and high hopes. People had
been wicked or wrong in the matter ; no one save himself
had been trivial. Now the baby had gone, but there re-
mained this vast apparatus of pride and pity and love. For
the dead, who seem to take away so much really take with
them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused
lives after them, easy to transmute or transfer, but well-nigh
impossible to destroy. And Philip knew that he was still
voyaging on the same magnificent, perilous sea, with the
sun or the clouds above him, and the tides below.

This insistence on the(importance of non-triviali ty, of
passio nat el y desirin g or passionately acting) is a corollary
to the main emphasis on the “ natural” Jife . and comes
out again and again in the novels. It appears for example
in Philip’s final realization of what Mrs. Herriton and her
way of life — the conventional, stereotyped world — really
amounts to :

Her life, he saw, was without meaning. To what purpose
was her diplomacy, her insincerity, her continued repression
of vigour ? Did they make anyone better or happier ? Did
they even bring happiness to herself ? Harriet with her
gloomy peevish creed, Lilia with her clutches after pleasure,
were after all more divine than this well-ordered, active,
useless machine.

'jSjJgame comment of course and the same attitude
J^mnd it is seen in Rickie’s reaction to Mrs. Failing in
rThe Longest Journey , and in the significant remark on his
own behaviour :

82

E. M. FORSTER

It seems to me that here and there in life we meet with a
person or incident that is symbolical. It's nothing in itself,
yet for the moment it stands for some eternal principle.
We accept it, at whatever cost, and we have accepted life.
But if we are frightened and reject it, the moment, so to
speak, passes ; the symbol is never offered again.

This attitude, again, is at the basis of A Room with a
View , where Lucy’s muddle proceeds from her refusal to
accept the moment of harmony with George as being
valid; $id appears most explicidy of all in Caroline’s
words to Philip towards the end of Where Angels Fear to
Tread :

“Every little trifle” (she says), “for some reason does
appear incalculably important today, and when you say of
a thing that “nothing hangs on it” it sounds like blasphemy.
There's never any knowing (how am I to put it ?) which of
our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things
hanging on it for ever.”

And of course in this book the whole crisis turns on an
apparendy trivial happening.

'This is obviously an attitude extremely important to
Forster — the need for . vital response . . wholeness^js diQle 1
p articipati on, significance — and ought to be remembered
when one comes to A Passage Jo India .

It is natural perhaps that a belief m violent action or j
violent feeling should go along with this — at any’ rate in
these three early novels, and in Howard’s End, the presence
of sudden irruption of passio nate feeling*' violentagj^pt,
or sud den death, is very marked. /The Italian who ^
'stabbed in front of Lucy and George’s eyes in a moment^
(in A Room with a View), the death of the baby (in Where

S 3

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL-

AngelsFearto Tread), Leonard’s sudden death (in Howard’s
End), Gerald’s sudden death on the playing field (in The
Longest Journey ) — all these are neither accidental nor un-
important., It underlies Forster’s attitude fundamentally,
and perhaps Rickie’s words when the tram which he and
his friends are not in, overturns on its way from Cam-
bridge station and a passenger is killed, serve to bring
this out :

“In his short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths,
and that is enough to disarrange any placid oudo'Sk on die
world. He knew once for all that we are all of us bubbles
on an extremely rough sea. Into this sea humanity has built
as it were, some little breakwaters — scientific knowledge,
civilized restraint — so that the bubbles do not break so fre-
quendy or so soon. But the sea has not altered, and it was
only a chance that he, Ansell, Tilkard, and Mrs. Aberdeen
had not all been killed in the tram.

They waited for the other tram by the Roman Catholic

church It watches over the apostate city, taller by many

a yard than anything within, and asserting, however wildly,
that here is eternity, stability, and bubbles unbreakable on a
windless sea.”

The approach indicated in the last sentence, however,
is not Forster’s. He points, as well as anyone, to that
"collapse in the structure of the modem worldjfwith which
"Dr. Richards deals in the chapter on beliefs in Principles
of Literary Criticism, and more especially in Science and
Poetry^ - But one of the most interesting things about
JForstefs work is that in the later novels there is an attempt
to .substitute so mething .elsafor-the religious „ s auction —
“asserting . . . that here is eternity, stability, and bubbles
unbreakable on a windless sea.” This is done partly, of

84

E. M. FORSTER

course, in the early novels, by the attitude to the harmony
or “rightness” attained by the. freejifk, the “integral”
life of feeling. But Forster is able to discard or modify an
attitude which he discovers, through time or change in
experience, to be too uncompromising. There is thus a
continual feeling of growth and progression in the novels,
even though the main theme may be fairly constant.

2

[To take the modification of this attitude first. The
insistence on the value of free response is justified
radiantly at the conclusion of A Room with a View,
justified soberly in The Longest Journey, and apparently
left wavering in Where Angels Fear to Tread. This novel
deserves some further discussion as it is very important
from this point of view — in some ways it foreshadows the
view taken in A Passage to India, and may help to elucidate
some of the vexed questions which that book raises.’, I

Caroline Abbott and Philip Herriton are the people in
Where Angels Fear to Tread with a spark of imaginative
intuition, who go through an experience in Italy— an
apparently trivial experience — which alters the whole
world for them. They try to rescue Lilia’s child and are
not successful ; Harriet steals the child ; the carriage in
which they take it away upsets in the mud, and it is killed.
Gino the father tries in insane grief and fury to kill Philip ;
Caroline intervenes and the two men are reconciled.
The English people return to England.

At one point in the tale, Caroline and Philip meet in the
church of the little town when, after Philip has felt the

85

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL-

liberating influence of feeling at the Italian theatre, he is
beginning to be aware, as he afterwards puts it, of “the
vast apparatus of pride and pity and love” involved.
They talk together ; Philip speaks :

“Going to the theatre yesterday, talking to you now — I
don’t suppose I shall ever meet anything greater. I seem
fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or
moving it — and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s
good or evil. . . . Life to me is just a spectacle.” _

She said solemnly, “I wish something would happen to
you, my dear friend, I wish something would happen
to you.”

“But why?” he asked smiling. “Prove to me why I
don’t do as I am.”

She also smiled, very gravely. She could not prove it.
No argument existed. Their discourse, splendid as it had
been, v res ulted in nothing) and their respective opinions and
policies were exactly the same when they left the church as
when they had entered it.

Jt is impossible here not to be reminded of that con-
versation between Miss Quested and Fielding in A Passage
to India, Qf here the same detachment, the same negation o f
romantic feeling , is implied, but one step further in the
negative direction. Fielding and Miss Quested in the
later book may be taken in a sense to Symbolize sanity^
good-will, common senseVat this point in the tale at
least) — and they have been drawn together after the dis-
astrous incident in the trial of the Indian when Miss
Quested’s honesty destroys the charge against him :

“I want to go living a bit.”

“So do I.”

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air.

86

E. M. FORSTER

Both man and woman were at the height of their powers,
sensible, honest, even subtle. They spoke the same lan-
guage and held the same opinions, and the variety of age and
sex did not divide them. Yet they were dissatisfied. When
they^agreed, “I want to go on living a bit/' or “I don t
believe in God,” the words were followed by a curious
backwash as though the universe had displaced itself to fill
up a tiny void, or as though they had seen their own
gestures from an immense height — dwarfs talking, shaking
hands and assuring each other that they stood on the same
footing of insight.

Again this sort of distrust comes out, to revert to Where
Angels Fear to Tread, in Philip’s feelings after the crisis :

Life was greater than he had supposed, but it was even
less complete. He had seen the need for strenuous work and
righteousness. And now he saw what a very little way
these things would go.

This, however, is not the last statement in that most
interesting book. The final sentences are a supreme
achievement, on Forster’s part, of th e__halancing or in -
clusion of the two opposing; attitu des. As they are in the
train going back to England, Caroline tells Philip of her
love for Gino just as Philip is beginning to hope that his
love for her may be returned. Forster goes beyond the
merely personal question of Philip’s disappointment :

Out of this wreck there was revealed to him something

that was indestructible This episode which she thought

so sordid, and which was so tragic for him, remained
supremely beautiful. To such a height was he lined, that
without regret he could now have told her that he was her
worshipper too. But what was the use of telling her ? For
all the wonderful things had happened.

87

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL ,

“Thank you,” was all that he permitted himself. “Thank
you for everything.”

She looked at him with great friendliness, for he had
made her life endurable! At that moment the train entered
the San Gothard tunnel. They hurried back to the carriage to
close the windows lest the smuts should get into Harriet’s eyes.

When one remembers that all through the book
• Harriet has symbohzed conventionality, dullness, trivial-
ity/ and that these are the last sentences of the book, it is
, clear that they illustrate Forster’s power of ironic^etach-,
ment, of including the point of view most in opposition]
to the feeling he is communicating. He does not erect
his world of feeling on a false basis ; h^makes allowance
for the materialism, the convention, the pettiness which,
he hates and oppose^; he reckons with it instead of
suppressing it.

One might however conclude from the end of this book
that a kind of disillusion was setting in, the disillusion
which seems to have been, as far as critics were concerned,
the most important feature of A Passage to India. r
But before discussing this most important novel, some- '
thing must be said about Howard’s End, a book which
seems to stand by itself half-way between the early novels
■ and the last one. In this novel we first openly come on
the emphasis on th evalue of p ersonal relationships— the
second substitute, as it were, for the religious sanction —
a value implied though not stressed in the other novels.
It is latent in them and comes out occasionally specifically,
as in Rickie’s final acceptance of Stephen, in Philip’s
attitude to Gino at the end, in the relationship between
Lucy and George. For Forster, as for Lawrence, personal

88

E. M. FORSTER

relationships are only possible when (accompanied by a
realization of the complete integrity, so to speak, of the
other person involved.)

Even when we love people we desire to keep some
comer secret from them, however small; it is a human
right ; it is personality. (The Longest Journey.)

Sometimes it comes out by an expression in general terms :

In public life who shall express the unseen adequately s
It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity ; per-
sonal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a per-
sonality beyond our daily vision.” (Howard’s End.)

In Howard’s End this is what underlies the whole
scheme ; (Margaret and her sister realize the sacredness of
personality') the Wilcoxes do not. The Wilcoxes are
W Forster’s (materialists) the whole family, with the notable
exception of Mrs. Wilcox, being practical, prosperous,
unimaginative. Henry Wilcox is almost the worst. Yet
he marries Margaret, whose values are essentially those of
the ^ion-conventional world) and Forster leaves us in no
doubt finally as to the sympathy between them. The
materialist in Henry, it is true, has first to be broken by
violent circumstances; but what is remarkable in this
book is that, unlike all the earlier ones, there is a(cleliberate
association between the people who stand for completely
different attitudes)— between the Wilcoxes, and Margaret
and her sister. And the regeneration of the Wilcoxes is
asserted almost at the expense of the justification of
“pure” feeling as exemplified by Helen and Leonard.”
There isjjoJgpger^.^jQ^ between them,

as there is between what George stands for against Cecil,

89

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL-

Gino against Mrs. Herriton, Stephen against Mr. Pem-
broke. In this respect this novel indicates a much more
inclusive, much more -mature point of view than the
others. It is indeed Forster’s most valuable book, if we
except A Passage to India, partly because ^f its tone of
'"reconciliation, of the harmony of opposites^

Further, the characters who symbolize free as against
conventional feeling, have altered and become much
more individ ual. In the early books, Stephen, Gino,
George, are all comparable and have the same. essential
features in common. There is no one quite of that kind
in Howard’s End. But the person who represents the
“right ” attitude, is the first Mrs. Wilcox, who loves
Howard’s End like a person and bequeaths it to Margaret
as her spiritual heir. Mrs. Wilcox appears in the flesh
very little, once to bring harmony out of a quarrel, once
to awaken Margaret to awareness, but all through the
book and after her death her influence is apparent, in
something of the same way in which Mrs. Ramsay’s is in
To the Lighthouse. She has an extraordinary influence,
yet she is after all, as Forster is at pains to make clear, a
very ordinary person. >

In this respect Mrs. Wilcox is a central figure in
Forster’s work. She recalls Rickie’s moth er in The
Longest Journey, and anticipates that most important char-
acter, or perhaps “presence” would be a better word than
“character,” Mrs. Moore, in A Passage to India ; Howard’s
End, iiT this respect” marks a moment of pause for Forster
before A Passage to India. 'In it he has deliberately stressed
the value of personal relationships — implicitly gathering
up in that a great deal of the ideas on non-conventionality

90

E. M. FORSTER

lexpressed in the earlier books, and asserting this as being
[the only kind of stable basis for existence. In A Passage
to India personal relationships appear to be doubted.

This last book which— as far as the novels are con-
cerned — appeared after a silence of fourteen years, and
which ostensibly .deals with the difficulties nfcommunica-
.tjon.and nn demanding b etwe en .EastLancLWest, this, last
book has been hailed by critics as representing the(post-
War attitude of despair and disillusion and disintegration)
as weh -as anything could. Certainly, as one would
expect, the tone is different from the free comic overflow
of the earlier novels. But it is a case of development
rather than of change ; and though naturally, because the
writer is older, the tone is more meditativ e, less im-
passioned, and therefore with more emphasis on ironic
detac hment , th e, general conclu sions, it reaches may be
found to be the same as in the earlier novels, with certain
modifications.

The earlier novels substitute belief in the life of impuls e
for the religious belie f. Howard's End substitutes belief
in personal-relationships. A Passage to India subdy seems
to deny complete belief both in personal relationships
and in the free way of living. What it offers positively
is Mrs. Moore and what she stands for. *

Mrs. Moore is the perfecdy ordinary and at times
rather tiresome old lady who accompanies Adela Quested
to India, who after the Marabar Caves episode leaves her,
and on the voyage home to England in the hof season,
dies on board ship. yTike Mrs. Wilcox, she has uety
litde. pract ically to do with the_evsttfs.that take place.
But her influence subdv remains with everyone she has

9i

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL -

net, and with a great many people she hasn’t met ; and
Forster, sometimes with his tongue in his cheek, some-
imes perfectly seriously;, almost exalts her to the role of
presiding deity .

It is to Mrs. Moore that the experience in the Marabar
:aves happens, the experience of disillusio n, of utter
legation ofjv aliic :

She had come to that state where the horror of the uni-
verse and its smallness are both visible at the same time — the
twilight of the double vision in which so ma»y 'elderly
people are involved./ If this world is not to our taste, well
at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation — one or
other of those large things, that huge scenic background of
stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all
that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background,
just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our
taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of
the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which
no high-sounding words can be found ; we can neither act
nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect
infinity. v Mrs. Moore had always inclined to resignation.
As soon as she landed in India it seemed to her good. . . .
To be one with the Universe ! So dignified and simple.
But there was always some little duty to be performed first,
some new card to be turned up from the diminishing pack
and placed, and while she was pottering about, the Marabar
struck its gong.

The echo in a Marabar cave is entirely devoid of dis-
tinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise
replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is
absorbed into the roof. “Bourn” is the sound as far as the
human alphabet can express it, or “bou-oum,” or “ou-
boum” — -utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a

92

E. M. FORSTER

nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce “bourn.” . . . Mrs.
Moore did not wish to repeat that experience. The more
she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening
it became. She minded it much more now than at the time.
The crush and the smells she could forget, but the echo
began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on
hfe. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued,
had managed to murmur, “Pathos, piety, courage — they
exist and are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists,
nothing has value.”

I caSnO accept the view enunciated by many critics
that in that passage Forster's complete philosophy is ex-
pressed. Taken by itself, it does seem to indicate a
wearwresignatLo n. an acceptance of the negation of value..
a despair, which brings its author into line with the
Eliot of The Waste Land . Admitting the significance of
the passage, I yet think it fairer to accept it in its context,
and with reference to other remarks in the book itself,
as well as outside it. It is very important, for example,
to remember that on Mrs. Moore's journey through India
en route for England, there is a counteracting effect :

There was for instance a place called Asirgarh which she
passed at sunset and identified on a map — an enormous
fortress among wooded hills. . . . What could she connect it
with except its name ? N o thing ; she knew no one who lived
there. But it had looked at her twice and seemed to say, “I
do not vanish.” “I have not seen the right places,” she
thought (as she neared Bombay), ... As she drove through
the huge city she longed to stop . . . (but) the feet of the
horses moved her on, and presently the boat sailed and
thousands of coco-nut palms appeared all round the anchor-
age and climbed the hills to wave her farewell. “ So you
thought an echo was India ; you took the Marabar caves

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

for final’” they laughed. “What have we in co mm on
with them, or they with Asirgarh

Combined with Mrs! Moore’s later influence, this seems
to me evidence dangerous to neglect. At the trial it is a
sudden remembrance of her that makes Adela wifhrlro-n,
her accusation against Aziz, to the scandal of the European
colony and her own disgrace. At the trial also, the
Indians waiting outside have seized on Mrs. Moore’s name
and have turned it into a kind of ridiculous invocation ;

49 +

The tumult increased, the invocation of Mrs. Moore
continued, and people who did not know what the syllables
meant repeated them like a charm. They became Indian-
ized into Esmiss Esmoor ... a Hindu goddess.

“Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor.”

Suddenly it stopped. It was as if the prayer had been heard,
and the relics exhibited.

This idea is further amplified after the news reaches
India of Mrs. Moore’s death — with a good deal of serious-
ness underlying the lightness of the tone :

(Her) death took subtler and more lasting shapes in
Chandrapore. ... At one period two distinct tombs con-
taining Esmiss Esmoor’s remams were reported; one by
the tannery, the other up near the goods station. Mr.
McBryde visited them both and saw signs of the beginning
of a *cult — earthenware saucers and so on. Being an ex-
perienced official he did nothing to irritate it, and after a
week or so, the rash died down. “ There’s propaganda
behind all this,” he said, forgetting that a hundred years ago,
when Europeans still made their home in the countryside

94

E. M. FORSTER

and appealed to its imagination, they occasionally became
local demons after death — not a whole god perhaps, but
part of one, adding an epithet or gesture to what already
existed, just as the gods contnbute to the great gods, and
they to the philosophic Brahm.

Finally, it is the memory of Mrs . Moore which causes
the/reconciliation between Aziz on the one hand, and
Fielding and Mrs. Moore’s children on the o therewith
which the book ends. Significantly, too, Mrs. Moore’s
imag£4ppears momentarily to old Professor Godbole,the
Indian philosopher, when he is striving, through Krishna
worship, to attain a mystic harmony with the God . 1

In the face of all this, I find it impossible to agree that
Forster’s final, and possibly his most important, book
expresses only that sens e of disillusion which had begun
to be marked in Where Angels Fear to Tread , and which
receives its most open and precise expression in the
Marabar caves passage here. It seems to me much more
probable that this book sums up a great deal of what I
have tried to show as Forster’s characteristic point of
view in all his books. The_belief in a pagan freedom ha s
been modified , the belief in Personal relationships ha s
been as it were sublimated — Mrs. Moore represents a

(inore subtle and complicated fo rm of communication, of
/sympathy, of “ vision/’ When Adela talks to Fielding of
Htfe* cava^episodFand Aziz’ innocence, she acknowledges
that she herself does not really yet know what happened :

“Mrs. Moore — she did know.”

“How could she have known what we don’t ?”

1 This has an obvious affinity with that incident in To the Lighthouse ,
where Mrs. Ramsay, after her death, appears to Lily Briscoe.

95

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL
“ Telepathy, possibly.”

The pert, meagre word fell to the ground. Telepathy ;
What an explanation. . . . Perhaps life is a mystery, not a
muddle.

All through his work, Forster, as I have tried to show,
(Contrasts and brings together tw o o pposing, p oints o f
view which one may conveniently call the “romanti c”
and the “ironic.” In doing so he makes very clear
his own preference for the “romantic,” the “im-
pulsive,” the “integral” mode of feeling. In A*Passage
to India, a much more complicated book, admittedly his
preference is not so marked, but to a careful reader that
attitude is at least as strong ^s th^supposed mood of com-
plete disillusion, of negation of valu§) The book, in fact,
gives an extreme instance of his general method, and, it
is interesting to note, (the opposing attitudes are here
united in the person of Mrs. Moor^— she represents the
mystery as well as the muddle, helps to point t he ironic
detachme nt, the inte llectual aloofness, as well as the sym-
pathy, the mysterious significance, with which Forster is
concerned.

This is not a mean achievement to obtain completeness
out of such dissonant elements^} The combination of
intellectual detachment, of humorous observation, is not
often found very closely allied with what Wordsworth
calls the “visionary mood.” That Forster manages to
place them both in juxtaposition without causing either
ito be exaggerated or untruthful constitutes his claim to
(the possession of a distinctive attitu de, an attitude which
is worthy of serious consideration.

96

THE NOVELS OF
D. H. LAWRENCE

Laws?-nce is a curiously uneven writer. There is no
novelist of today who shows more obvious signs of power
and imagination — the dark, poetic power of a Webster —
nor one who at times can write so badly and think so
carelessly. His books come as though straight off the
pen, and one of their outstanding characteristics is their
naturalness and spontaneity. When the emotion behind
the writing is urgent and compelling, the style becomes
molten and glows with heat ; at other times it is col-
loquial and loose. Lawrence writes out of himself; he"
does not rely on intellectual comprehension, but on an
intuitive emotional apprehension of reality, communi-
cated forcibly and convincingly as he feels it.

' One of his greatest gifts is his power of description,
especially of natural description, in active quick prose,
unforced and vivid.. And again, perhaps one should say
of him, as one says of Keats, that no understanding of
Lawrence is possible without an intimate knowledge of
his letters. I do not intend, however, to deal with either
of these aspects now, but to concentrate on his central
ideas as expressed in the novels.

His books are disturbing — violent, bitter, contemptuous

G 97

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

— but in them one can discover an attitude, the expression
of which is extremely personal but which has a certain
definite and general value. A fi e is p reoccupied w ith. t fe
problem o£Ls_ex^Q5sessed by it as Webster was by the
idea of death, and almost all his books are attempts t.o
grapple with the problem and to find .a solution,- And
this is connected with his other, later preoccupation, the
problejn of nian^a^mtmeiit_to_the__universe— both im-
portant and huge themes ; and whether Lawrence is right
or wrong, at least he is positive in the statejjienrsf his
beliefs. He achieves most when he relies not on explicit
statement or theorizing but when he lets his characters
find their own expression and response to a situation.
But in every one of his books the same essential problem
(whether exphcit or latent) is set forth, and a similar
means of solution either found or indicated.

There are three chief “beliefs” or convictions which
continually recur : (x) The value of direct physical sensu-
ous feeling as against an intellectual understanding, “heart”
as against “head” knowledge. (2) The value of violent
feeling, as for instance, hate, as essentially bound up with
love and at times affording an equal satisfaction. (3) The
necessity for the individual to be separate, single, self-
complete even at the moment of most intimate union
with another individual. There is obviously a fallacy in
the second conviction; here he makes the mistake of
equating violent with deep — the two are by no means
necess&rily synonymous. There is undoubtedly a sadistic
element in Lawrence — it comes out perhaps most typically
in that poem, often quoted, not by any means his best
but characteristic of this side of him :

98

THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

Under the long dark boughs, like jewels red
In the hair of an Eastern girl

Hang strips of crimson cherries, .as if had bled
Blood-drops beneath each curl.

Under the glistening cherries, with folded wings
Three dead birds lie ;

Pale-breasted throstles and a blackbird, robberlings
Stained with red dye.

Against the haystack a girl stands laughing at me,

^Cherries hung round her ears.

Offers rile her scarlet fruit : I will see
If she has any tears.

These three “beliefs,” however, appear continually in
Lawrence’s work ; it is interesting to trace their develop-
ment from the first real novel, The White Peacock , to the
later books where at times the artistic presentation suffers
because of the violent and angry intrusion of theory.

The White Peacock in a sense stands by itself. It is com-
pletely different in tone from any of the other novels,
being conceived in a mood of reverie, the lyrical passive
mood which feels the flow of life and its regrets as much
in the changing features of a loved landscape as in the
fives of men. It is a kind of prose poem — the poetic
apprehension of fife that is a tangle and unhappy, but
that has exquisite moments. There are in it flaws and
lapses typical of an early work, but as a whole it stands
by itself as the expression in one mood of a musing on
life — Lettie, Leslie, Emily, Cyril are shadows on the
golden landscape, and represent that sinking into the
rich fife of earth which is characteristic of Lawrence.
But if this is true of the book as a whole, it must also be

99

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

said that in it the kind of reality with which Lawrence
afterwards deals enters from time to time — Sam and the
keeper’s household are as pressingly alive as anything
could be. And the tragic incursion of Tom into this
passive world of wistful longings and troubled acceptance
of life is very real and very disturbing. It is noticeable
indeed that though the book is sharply differentiated from
the others that follow, it yet contains the faint beginnings
of some of their prepossessions. The characters are in a
sense the first sketches for those in Sons andJLovefs^-the
situation between Emily and Cyril is the foreshadowing
of that between Paul and Miriam, although in The White
Peacock it is not so complex nor so distressing. Alice is
exactly the counterpart of Beatrice, who flashes into life
for a few moments in the scene in Paul’s kitchen, and is
moreover brought in to point the same contrast, between
her careless acceptance of life and Emily-Miriam’s shrink-
ing from and brooding on it. The encounter between
Leslie and Lettie before their marriage is another thing
which is out of character but typical of Lawrence. What
is really unessential to the movement of The White
Peacock as a whole, becomes the dominating theme of the
later books — the struggle between man and woman,
between man and himself, to effect a balance that will
make both sides richer, more complete and self-fulfilled.

Sons and Lovers is on the whole his best achievement,
although again it is not quite in line with the later de-
velopment. But it is an artistic triumph. In it what
afterwards becomes a specialized theme is treated broadly
and with a deep and searching appeal. Paul’s specific
experience may not be that of everyone, but Paul’s

ioo

. THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

relationships with Miriam and Clara on the one side and
with his mother on the other, are, generally, true. The
first awaking of passion, the strain and bewildered clash
of temperament between Paul and Miriam, the surfeit
and frustration of passion with Clara, the agony of his
mother’s death, and Paul’s feeling of despair and of a
meaningless world — all these carry their own sharp reality
and value with them. It is almost the only novel of
Lawrence’s which is complete in itself, each part necessary
to tn'e rest— it is noticeable for example how the early
scenes with the struggle between Mrs. Morel and her
husband are inevitable both psychologically and artistic-
ally for the truth of the account of Paul’s later develop-
ment. The book is obviously based (how obviously can
be corroborated by reading “E. T.’s” biography) on
actual experience, and it impresses one painfully but
magnificently with its truth and its power.

It is different with all the later books except The
Rainbow. The early part of The Rainbow rests on
Lawrence’s own experience, and there is a tenderness in
its sensuous feeling which is unusual in his writings.
There is also a sharp and new observation of the possible
relationship between man and woman which makes its
pressure felt convincingly. The first part of The Rainbow
is written out of satisfied senses; in it Lawrence con-
tributes some thin g new and valuable. The second part
seems to me less important, less vital ; the characters of
Gudrun and Ursula re-appear, grown-up, in WSmen in
Love and one can trace if one wishes to follow that kind
of experiment, their ways of behaviour back to their
roots in the first novel. But it is the first part which

ioi

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

contains the essential Lawrence ; he wrote of it in a letter :
“It is really something new in the art of the novel,” and
again, “Primarily I am a passionately religious man and
my novels must be written from the depth of my religious
experience.” The suppression of the book when it first
appeared must have affected him with anger and distrust.
Nothing Lawrence ever wrote afterwards has this tone
of sensuous ease, of gratification, in Blake’s sense ; and
every later book is either bitter or defiant.

Both Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow^t hen, ■''nave
been written out of a sharp, vital experience. In the
other novels the direct experience is fitful and they are
more or less formulations of a theory about human
relationships. Sons and Lovers is concerned with the
problem of sex — but not entirely. Paul’s relations with
both Miriam and Clara are stages in his development,
and, on the whole, are perhaps not so important as the
binding and dominant tie between him and his mother
(a very interesting autobiographical detail; Lawrence
obviously suffered from a “mother-complex”). What
is important in the book and what it seems to stress, is
Paul’s attitude to life after all these experiences. There
is no attempt to utter any explanation or criticism of
conduct ; but the last sentences of the book are an im-
aginative and luminous record of the capacity of the
individual for suffering and struggle :

“Where was he ? — one tiny upright speck of flesh, less
than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it.
On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing
him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost
nothing, he could not be extinct. Night in which every-

102

, THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

thing was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun.
Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for
terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a dark-
ness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted.
So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothing-
ness, and yet not nothing. . . .

But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he
walked towards the city’s gold phosphorescence. His fists
were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that
direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked to-
—^yards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.”

This general truth is not what the other novels are con-
cerned with/ In all of them Lawrence’s sensitive response
to Nature, his lively and evocative expression of the
scenes, people, places he himself has directly observed,
can be found, but more and more fragmentarily. He is
not content to give shape and form to his attitude towards
experience and his evaluation of it merely by means of
and through the actions, thoughts and expressions of his
characters : he is more and more concerned with an ex-
plicit expounding of his “beliefs 53 or theories on the
central problem of sex — a problem which seems at times
to block out any other consideration. This is what partly
accounts for the fact that the later books are all more or
less jerky, ill-balanced, incomplete — the ideas come so
fast and are expressed so quickly that there is not time to
weld them together into a coherent shape. Perhaps in
any case they would not form so; perhaps what is
valuable in them is the leaping, white-hot intefxsity of
feeling which lies behind them. J
The three most important books from the point of
view of a theory of relationships, are Women in Love ,

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

Aaron’s Rod, and the long short-story The Captains Doll.
If Sons and Lovers is Lawrence’s best book, Women in Love
is the most typical, both of his faults and his virtues — the
astonishing looseness and carelessness of expression and
construction, and the equally astonishing power oflighting
up detail and incident with the clearness of something
actually seen. AAd his theories can be found here, some-
times expressed implicitly in character revelation, some-
times openly and explicitly by comment or expression
in his own voice . The insistence on the violept emotions"
and their expression in physical outbursts is remarkable —
e.g. Hermione’s attempt to crush Birkin [compare with
this, the queer climax of The Fox, where the soldier killc
Banford] ; Birkin’s fight with Gerald ; the astonishing
quarrel on the roadside between Birkin and Ursula. It
is of course preoccupied with sex, and strives towards a
resolution of the problem in harmony. This harmony
just fails of attainment — and only just. Perhaps in no
other book is the conflict seen more clearly or a clearer
revelation given that “love,” for Lawrence, is not to be
equated with mere instinctive animalism. Middleton
Murry seems to me to have misunderstood the intention
of this novel completely . 1 On one side Gudrun and Gerald
[who may be said to represent “the heart,” i.e. direct
reliance on purely physical feeling], on the other Ursula
and Birkin, try to find a satisfying way of life. Gudrun
and Gerald attempt to find self-fulfilment through sexual
desire, fhrough the satisfaction of physical passion, but
the connection between love and hate is so near that at
last they realize one or the other of them must in the
1 Son of Woman, Middleton Murry (Cape, 1931), pp. 112-122.

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THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

process be destroyed. Ursula and Birkin, as an im-
mediate contrast, find harmony because their union is
not based merely on physical intimacy but on the assump-
tion (at any rate on Birkin’s part) of the value of each
personality’s being distinct and separate, even at the
height of passion. [“He said the individual was more
than love or than any relationship. For him, the bright
single soul accepted love as one of its conditions, a con-
dition of its own equilibrium.”] It is curious to find this
attitude in^the author of the Lost Girl, a book which
seems to justify the heart (i.e. direct feeling) versus head
(i.e. the power to “will” feeling, to feel at second hand),
in its perfect reliance on, and contentment with, the things
of the senses. But Birkin’s utterance, subtly enough, is
not an entire negation of feeling. The Hermione-Birkin
situation collapses because of Hermione’s insistence on the
“power to will” : the Gerald-Gudrun situation collapses
because of their entire reliance on direct and intense feel-
ing : the Birkin-Ursula situation is valid because, loving
each other, they realize that each personality is entirely
separate.

This singleness and separateness of the individual is
emphasized again in Aarons Rod, a book full of the dis-
integration and despair of the after-war world. How
vividly the experiences — Aaron’s abandonment of his
wife, his journeys in Italy, the discussions with the English-
men he meets, the disturbances of the Italian peasants, rise
up before one, as a background for the expression of his
development, through sexual experience, to a different
and more satisfying outlook. “He realized that he had
never intended to yield himself fully to her or to any-

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

thing . . . that his very being pivoted on the fact of his
isolate self-responsibility, aloneness. His intrinsic and
central aloneness was the very centre of his being. Break
it, and he broke his being.”

One might compare with this, a late novel Kangaroo,
where there is, characteristically, a most realistic and
moving account of the horrors of suspicion and dis-
comfort which a conscientious objector had to suffer in
wartime England, and where the chief theme of the book,
though not so direcdy expressed, is Somers’ efforfto
retain his “self-possession” in the new country of Aus-
tralia where men are brotherly and free and seek to
establish contact. The individualism which is shown, is,
if pushed to extremes, definitely anti-social; but in the
world of the artist it is the individual who counts. The
contrast between the world of reality and the world of
art, in this respect, is at times too difficult a matter for
Lawrence : there is an intrusion of actual life into theory
and vice versa, in the novels, which makes them at times
artistically poor. Nevertheless the underlying idea is both
true and valuable.

Of all the novels mentioned so far, none quite succeeds
in composing the different elements and forming a definite
and satisfying attitude to life. But in the Captains Doll
this is effected. It happens that here there is not only a
revelation of Lawrence’s meaning by means of the rela-
tions of the characters, but also in an explicit series of
statemefits, made by the Captain, who speaks in, and not
out of, his character. That is, the book combines success-
fully an artistic and a “philosophic” presentation of the
persistent problem — the adjustment of man to woman,

106

THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

and so of each to life. The explicit statements form four
stages of realization, and each stage can be found in the
other novels. The first comes when Hepburn gives him-
self up to his love for Hannele : “Words mean so little.
They mean nothing. And all that one thinks and plans
doesn’t amount to anything. Let me feel that we are
together and I don’t care about all the rest.” [ This is
obviously paralleled in the relationships between Gerald
and Gudrun, Paul and Clara, and the characters in The
~Lost Girl] „

The second stage occurs after the shock of his wife’s
death. “It affected him with instantaneous disgust when
anybody wanted to share emotions with him. He did
not want to share emotions of any sort. He wanted to
be by himself, essentially, even if he was moving about
among other people.” [Parallel statements can be found
throughout such novels, for instance, as Aarons Rod,
Women in Love, Kangaroo.]

The third stage comes as the development of a new
attitude, directly springing from the second : “We must
all be able to be alone, otherwise we are just victims. But
when we are able to be alone, then we realize that the
only thin g to do is to start a new relationship with another
— or even the same — human being. That people should
all be stuck up apart, like so many telegraph poles, is
nonsense.” This is the reiteration of the central belief
at the basis of the character of Paul, Birkin, Somers, and
is evidently one of the most stressed and constant With
it as a corollary there goes the almost hysterical denial of
love, the utter revulsion of feeling away from its con-
finement and enchainment to a freer realization of the

107

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL -

difficult but satisfying balance of two personalities. And
so comes the fourth stage : “If a woman loves you she’ll
make a doll out of you.- She’ll never be satisfied till she’s
made your doll. And when she’s got your doll, that’s all
she wants. And that’s what love means. And so, I won’t
be loved, and I won’t love. I won’t have anybody loving
me. It is an insult ... I’ll be honoured and I’ll be obeyed :
or nothing.” (Compare Women in Love, Aarons Rod.)
Perhaps it is worth saying again that to Lawrence “love”
in this sense means a falsification of the deeper impulses^
a falsification which springs from the mind and its notions.

Detached from its context this may seem ridiculous or
absurd; in its context it is illuminating and critical. It
is difficult to detach the “ideas” in a book from the book
itself, and often dangerous./ Lawrence has the poet’s
power of expressing his feelings about life in symbols —
the embodied and palpable forms of his characters. He is
most successful artistically when his characters are allowed
to speak for themselves and to us, directly, out of their
own situation. But with all the flaws and confusions into
which Lawrence’s thought, or rather, intuition leads him,
one is able to gather from the novels — not a systematiza-
tion of conduct — but a consistent way of dealing with
experience, a consistent attitude to life. • The Captain’s
Doll expresses fully what almost all the other novels ex-
press in part ; direct contact by means of emotion has
been tried and found wanting : the individual finds him-
self to be' more than any one of his experiences, even than
the experience of love ; but individual relationships with
others are necessary to the fulfilment of personality.
Hence the conception of a relationship which will consist

108

THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

of the reciprocal balance and poise of two “ self-possessed ’
entities, and will so afford both freedom and completion
of the personality.

This is a valuable conception, but it is not enough for
Lawrence. The Captain's Doll is not altogether typical of
his attitude. The major problem of man’s adjustment to
the universe he finds himself in, still has to be solved.
This for Lawrence was connected with the problem of
finding a leader, and in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
he has much to say on this point which lights up his
doctrine in some of the later novels, notably in The
Plumed Serpent . Lawrence was interested in the problem
of personal adjustment because for him it implied some-
thing more than mere personality. He writes for instance
in a letter :

You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of
the character. There is another ego, according to whose
action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through,
as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense
than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states
of the same single radically unchanged element.

And this state of, what he elsewhere calls “lapsed con-
sciousness” when the self is swallowed up in the general
dark flow and rhythm of life, is emphasized again and
again, sometimes in that peculiar phraseology which
makes him for some readers irritating — for instance the
passage about Kate’s feeling in The Plumed Serpent :

She would begin to approximate to the old mode of
consciousness, the old, dark will, the unconcern for death,
the subtle dark consciousness, non-cerebral, but vertebrate.
When the mind and the power of man was in his blood

109

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

and his backbone, and there was the strange dark inter-
communication between man and man and man and beast
from the powerful spine.

Lawrence hates and despises the modem mechanical
world and its values and tries to set up a new world and
a new value. But in order to do this he proceeds back-
wards. Just as in his theory of human relationships he
relies basically on this dark sympathetic “polarity” which
has nothing to do with the mind, so in establishing a new
Atlantis he draws on the dark primitive state of tribes
away from the corrupting influence of civilization. In
The Lost Girl there is a passage which anticipates — al-
though the tone is not yet one of complete acquiescence —
the theme which is developed in St. Mawr , Mornings in
Mexico , and The Plumed Serpent 1 :

“It seems there are places which resist us, which have the
power to overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every
country had its potent negative centres, localities which
savagely and triumphandy refuse our living culture. And
Alvina had struck one of these, here on the edge of the
Abruzzi . . . and yet, what could be more lovely than the
sunny days: pure, hot, blue days among the mountain
foothills. . . . Nothing could have been more marvellous
than the winter twilight. Sometimes Alvina and Pancrazio
were late returning with the ass. And then gingerly the ass
would step down the steep banks, already beginning to
freeze when the sun went down. And again and again he
would balk the stream, while a violet-blue dusk descended
on the white, wide stream-bed, and the scrub and lower
hills became dark, and in heaven, oh, almost unbearably

1 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious gives a rationalized statement
of his views and is very important in this connection. Compare
Lawrence’s three centres of life with the Yogi.

IIO

THE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

lovely, the snow of the near mountains was burning rose,
agamst the dark-blue heavens. How unspeakably lovely it
was no one could ever tell, the grand pagan twilight of the
valleys, savage, cold, with a sense of ancient gods who knew
the right for human sacrifice. It stole away the soul of
Alvina. She felt transfigured in it, clairvoyant in another
mystery of life. A savage hardness came in her heart. The
gods who had demanded human sacrifice were right, im-
mutably right. The fierce savage gods who dipped their
lips in blood, these were the true gods/’

In The Plumed Serpent the old gods of Christianity are
useless ; it is time to look for new gods, for the godhead
which is in every man when he is in full accord with the
deep natural rhythm of the earth :

The sun has climbed the hill, the day is on the downward
slope.

Between the morning and the afternoon, stand I here with
my soul, and lift it up.

My soul is heavy with sunshine, and steeped with strength.
The sunbeams have filled me like a honeycomb.

It is the moment of fullness,

And the top of the morning.

Here the two ideas of leadership’ * or “godship” and
of the primitive blood-bond with natural forces, unite in
a poem which has something of the fervour and imagery
of the prophets of the Old Testament. In this novel —
which is perhaps the most explicit statement of his belief
that we have — the theme is treated with a great deal of
imaginative vigour. One of the most striking passages
occurs near the beginning where Kate voyages down the
lake and the quiet unfolding of life, the instinctive peace
of Nature is contrasted with the disintegration of the so-

in

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

called ‘ ‘ civilized ’ ’ world. There are times when Lawrence
seems to be a wilder and more savage Wordsworth, with
a similar power of evoking the actual experience. As
the book progresses, however, it seems to me to decline
in force. The emphasis on blood-contact, the primitive
emotional reaction to the tom-tom beating, Ramon’s
hymns — all these lack a final impressiveness. Lawrence
tries very hard to make us believe that his solution is the
final one, but one cannot help suspecting that he is at
the same time trying to persuade himself. Ramon, who
represents his views best, is really conscious of defeat. As
for the lesser figures, Kate and Cipriano, they are ex-
tremely unsatisfactory: Kate comes over to the new
religion very half-heartedly and wavers in her allegiance
to it : and her marriage to Cipriano seems to be due to
nothing more than physical impulse, though Lawrence
tries to invest it with mysterious significance.

The novel is a failure — but a gigantic one, which shows
Lawrence’s power as well as his limitations. In it, as in
all his work, there is a remarkable indictment of some
of the false values of modem life ; a deep sense of the
mystery and religious character of the most important
experiences of life, including sex ; and a conviction that
life cannot be lived fully unless one is in harmony with
the rhythmical flow of natural forces, the movement of
the sun and of the seasons. All of these are valuable
notions, which contain more than a grain of truth. By
his power as a novelist and even more by his power as
a poet (and here I am not thinking of the poems)— in
spite of incoherence, over-emphasis and violence —
Lawrence forces us to listen to him and to think.

1 12

THE TRAGIC IN HARDY
AND CONRAD

Both Conrad and Hardy seem in a sense a little old-
fashioned if one puts them beside contemporary names —
Joyce, Hemingway, dos Passos, Faulkner, Powys; but
they are important as having, in contrast with most of
the writers of this century, a profound tragic sense. Both
deflect tragedy a little, into a new course, by a subtle
alteration of its elements ; Hardy, by an emphasis on both
bitterness and pity; Conrad, by a combination of ro-
manticism and irony. I shall attempt only a few remarks
on Hardy before going on to a more general survey of
Conrad.

Hardy may be regarded as a sort of pioneer in the
. modem novel ; one should remember that in his day he
was regarded as “advanced” and revolutionary — Tess of
the d’Urbervilles on its appearance was regarded with sus-
picion, and Jude the Obscure is obviously a propagandist
novel, propagandist in respect of ideas. A whole ferment
of new social ideas and criticism of the old order lies
behind many of his books. Equally obvious is his' feeling
for the country, especially one particular locality, and
intimately bound up with that, his feeling for the kind of
individual who is as it were the particular “tree walking”
H 113

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

of that locality — such characters as Gabriel Oak, Clym
Yeobright, Diggory Venn, Marty South, all of whom,
like Wordsworth’s Michael, seem to spring out of and
endure with the landscape which is their background.
One might indeed take as a motto for Hardy’s novels
those lines of Wordsworth’s :

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,

And shares the nature of infinity.

The comparison with Wordsworth is by no me an< for-
tuitous. Hardy has been said to be Wordsworth a hun-
dred years older and wiser, and there seems to be a
regular progression from Wordsworth’s attitude to
nature, with its emphasis on joy, through Arnold, who '
echoes while repudiating, as in the lines :

He sees life unroll
A placid and continuous whole ;

That general life which does not cease.

Whose secret is not joy, but peace.

and so to Hardy who would have substituted instead of
peace, something like endurance or fortitude. Endurance
or fortitude in the face of an ironic and even spiteful
universe, for of course Hardy’s universe is controlled by
' powers who, as he indicates at the end of Tess, mock at
mankind.

I say this because critics have made a great deal of the
pessimism which seems to spoil the tragic tone of the
novels 5 but ought one not rather to say it is this very
pessimism that gives specific tone, that tone of astringent
bitterness which marks Hardy’s shift of the tragic em-
phasis i Tragedy turns in his hands not “to favour and

X14

'THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

to prettiness ” but to labour and to bitterness. It is true,
however, that in his novels the odds are weighted against
the characters too mechanically by means of accident.
The preponderance of fatal accident in Hardy’s world is
of course notorious, and in Jude the Obscure especially it
seems to be oppressively and inartistically emphasized.
In spite of many extremely fine things in that book — and
its realism and starkness divide it off sharply from any
lesser work; it is very much a book of ideas and of
modem ideas — in spite of this, the mechanical handling
of the characters in order to bring out Hardy’s accusation
against the universe, lessens its value. I mean for instance
the unintelligence shown by such an intelligent character
as Sue in moments of crisis; her actions seem out of
keeping with the character as previously delineated.

The words “ view of the universe,” not a phrase which
troubles most of the modems very much (except
Lawrence), are essential for Hardy. He is a serious tragic
artist concerned with those issues and presenting to us
characters also so concerned. When one points out that
in his novels the plot seems conditioned by accident, such
notorious accidents as the mislaid letter in Tess, Clym’s
absence from home when his mother makes her last
journey over the moor, the small fatal chances in The
Mayor of Casterbridge , one has also to say that, in accord-
ance with Aristotle’s profoundly true statement, the
characters are essentially the cause of their own destiny.
That a character is what it is, of course, can be pushed
back out of its control to rest on heredity and environ-
ment, and Hardy emphasizes this semi-fatalistic attitude
markedly. But this 4 'accidental” inheritance is not only

ii5

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL'

legitimate but important, on a tragic view, and it is this
which in its turn produces Hardy’s profound pity for the
nature of mankind.

What is perhaps more important is Hardy’s emphasis
on patural as^gainst^social law, and here too he tends to
over-stress both in Tess and Jude, bitterly inveighing
against social conditions which drive Tess, his “pure
woman” as he himself calls her, to destruction or which
result in the Elizabethan holocaust of Jude the Obscure.
This of course, while it gives a curiously dated air to his
work , 1 also makes him valuable as a social novelist of a
time which has not yet, in spite of many reforms, quite
passed by. But allowing for this, his general and per-
manent value lies rather in his presentation of a tragic
character against his natural background in a way in
which both largeness and accurate truth are combined.
Nothing could be more exquisite than the change from
the idyllic atmosphere of those dairy scenes in Tess which
breathe the richness and content of earth, to the later
starve-crow farm where she gains her hard living. When
one thinks of someone with whom to compare Hardy,
one has to turn to the greatest names, to the epic con-

1 It is very interesting to compare Hardy in this respect with
“Mark Rutherford,” whose view is in some respects more modem
and more intellectual. I am thinking here of his (M. Rutherford’s)
treatment of Madge in Clara Hopgood, who realizes that the moment-
ary act of passion with Frank is something not integral to her char-
acter and which therefore cannot be permitted to act as a conventional
inhibition on her life ; she therefore refuses to marry him, having
surveyed the situation with her full intelligence, whereas Tess (her
weakness and strength both lying in this) acts only through her
natural instincts. All Hardy’s characters who break the social law
suffer, sometimes inartistically and unjustifiably.

116

THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

ception of Tolstoi, the dramatic conception of Shake-
speare. Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge
is like those stormy heroes of Shakespeare, Macbeth or
Othello, the man of passion whose many good qualities
are undermined by one fatal flaw and circumstance.
Henchard is a superb example of the true tragic character,
from his first appearance selling his wife in a drunken
im patient fit at the fair, through his triumphant rise to
power (the comparison of the structure of the book is
with the curyes of a play and shares something of that
concentration), to that last glimpse of him as he makes
his way out of the town, degraded, solitary, wretched.
His self-written epitaph in its savage bareness and pride
echoes the nature which has been its own downfall and
has roused both pity and fear :

Michael Henchard’s Will

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.

& tha t I be not bury’d in consecrated ground.

& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.

& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.

& that no mumers walk behind me at my funeral.

& that no flours be planted on my grave.

& that no man remember me.

To this I put my name.

Michael Henchard.

It is this power of representing both passion and pity
(& that no man remember me) which ultimately constitutes
Hardy’s claim to greatness. In spite of the sometimes too
explicit bitterness, the almost intellectually dishonest use
of contrived circumstance (Hardy’s substitute for the

117

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL'

diabolus ex machina), in spite of this, pity and fear
the Aristotelian desiderata, are fused in his novels to a
new amalgam. Perhaps pity predominates, as for in-
stance Henchard’s pathetic last attempt to visit his
daughter with a present of a goldfinch which he leaves
“trader a bush outside to lessen the awkwardness of his
arrival.” When he is repulsed by Elizabeth-Jane and
turns in bitterness away from the house, the cage is left
behind and discovered some days later — “a new bird-
cage, shrouded in newspaper, and at the bottom of the
cage a little ball of feathers — the dead body of a gold-
finch.” Hardy’s power of conveying tenderness for the
particular person or thing through the statement of a
stony and barren philosophy may be seen more con-
centratedly in that exquisite little poem Proud Songsters
(itself reminiscent of Wordsworth’s

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones, and trees).

This is the poem :

The thrushes sing as the sun is going
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs.

And as it grows dark, loud nightingales
In bushes

Pipe, as they can, when April wears
As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of one year’s growing
Which a year ago or less than twain,

No finches were, nor nightingales.

Nor thrushes,

But only particles of grain
And earth and air and rain.

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THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

Behind its apparent simplicity is a complex attitude-
stoic acceptance of the inanimate origin and return of
animate life; a feeling of pity .and tenderness for the
creatures momentarily so vital, as if all Time were theirs ,
when the irony is both in the fact that they have so little
of it, and that they are unconscious of the dusty end
which awaits them ; and, surprisingly, a hint, since earth
and air and rain are integral elements for life, of the
miraculous re-birth from nothingness. One thinks of
that companionate comparison in Bede, of the duration
of mans life as like a sparrow’s flight in winter through
a warm lighted hall, from darkness to darkness. It is 'the
impression of Hardy’s humanitarianism which finally re-
mains with one — pity for man and his sufferings, pity
intensified by his consciousness of the unfairness both of
man’s surroundings and of his own make-up.

Conrad, with whom Hardy has much in common , 1 is
impelled by a different purpose — to show the tangle, the
inexplicable element in life. For this purpose he invents
in some of his most important novels the figure of
Marlowe, the shadowy ideal spectator who tells the story
as he sees it. By means of him the story can be told with
the effect of conversational ease and with a wealth of
detail otherwise impossible; we see the incidents as it
were coming to life, beating themselves out in his mind

1 Here I must acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Richards, who
first pointed out to me that pity and fear in Conrad are 'very subtly
altered, so that the emphasis is laid finally on something which I
should call “admiration.”

I must also thank Dr. Richards for first directing my attention to
the importance of the scene with Stein in Lord Jim.

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL-

as it discovers and illuminates truth. Marlowe can
obviously be compared with the ideal spectator of Henry
James who uses his “beautiful intelligence” to sort out
the complicated pieces of the puzzle ; just as in James, the
complexity and difficulty of the process is emphasized,
and the simplicity of the final result. This method of
gradual accretion in the mind of one person is useful not
only to show the intricacy of problems of behaviour but
also to give a framework, to detach the problem from
immediacy. We see Flora in Chance or Lor^d Jim in the
novel of that name as it were at one remove because
thfough the eyes of Marlowe, and an effect of distance
or perspective is given. (The most modem development
of this method is perhaps Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs,
a novel, as Edwin Muir calls it, about a novelist writing
a novel.) This technique is especially useful in a book
like Chance whose main theme is the exposure of all
possible variations in a given problem of adjustment, in
order to show how mysterious and unaccountable human
behaviour is — a theme and method which has affinities
with Browning’s in The Ring and the Book. In this way
the tragic figure of Flora de Barral is slowly and in-
directly presented to us so intimately as almost to be felt
like oneself ; and every detail of her unfortunate position,
friendless in a world where friendship is one of the
supreme gifts and the most secure (a favourite emphasis
of Conrad’s to which I shall return later) is told so as to
bring out the perplexity and tangle of human affairs. In
Lord Jim this narration from inside is not so successful;
Marlowe is in place throughout the first part which is on
the whole meditative, but in the second part which is

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more important and more passionate, the method occa-
sionally breaks down. In Heart of Darkness , however, that
short story which must be placed* among the most typical
and best of all Conrad’s writing, it is entirely successful.
The story is of a young man who sails up lonely reach
after reach in the darkest forest of Africa past various out-
posts of progress and civilization until he reaches the final
one of all set in the heart of the dark land ; there he sees
Kurtz, the manager whom he has come to meet and who
is regarded 2$ a pioneer of light only to find him degraded
and obsessed with the most horrible rites of native witch-
craft. Whether a personal experience lies behind this' or
not, the power with which a sense of the evil and sinister
is conveyed is extremely impressive. Method and subject
in this tale are equivalent ; the quiet reflective narration
only emphasizes the more the sudden shock with which
the dark enchanted figure of Kurtz is finally revealed —
enchanted in the sense in which Coleridge uses it, the
drawing, magical power of evil. In this tale there is an
important symbolic emphasis on the mystery of the *
human voice, seen for example in one of the early
descriptions of Kurtz :

Of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminendy, that
carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk,
his words — the gift of expression, the bewildering, the
illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible,
the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the
heart of an impenetrable darkness.

This is emphasized at point after point in the tale so that
Kurtz, by a cumulative effect becomes as it were a voice
crying in the wilderness, a voice finally of the most

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sinister revelation. The most dramatic and concentrated
part of the story occurs at the end when, after Kurtz’s
death, Marlowe visits Kurtz’s fiancee in England :

I thought his memory was like the other memories of the
dead that accumulate in every man’s life — a vague impress
on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift
and final passage ; but before the high and ponderous door,
between the tall houses of a street as still and decorous as a
well-kept alley m a cemetery, I had a vision of him on the
stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously as if to devour all
the earth with all its mankind. He lived thdh before me ;
he lived as much as he had ever lived — a shadow insatiable
of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow
darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in
the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. . . . And the memory of
what I had heard him say afar there, with the homed shapes
stirring at my back, in the glow of fires, within the patient
woods, those broken phrases came back to me, were heard
again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity. ... I
seemed to hear the whispered cry, “The horror! The
horror!” . . .

Marlowe enters the house to find Kurtz’s fiancee (who
has some of the nobility of the later heroines) overcome
with grief and anxious to recapture any memory he
possesses of the final end of the man she loved :

“No,” she cried. “It is impossible that all this should
be lost — that such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing
— but sorrow. You know what vast plans he had. I knew
of them too — I could not perhaps understand — but others
knew of them. Something must remain. His words, at
least, have not died.”

“His words will remain,” I said. . . . She said suddenly
very low, “He died as he lived.”

THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

“His end,” said I, with dull anger stirring in me, “was in
every way worthy of his life.”

“And I was not with him,” she murmured. My anger
subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.

“Everything that could be done ” I mumbled.

“Ah, but I believed in him more than anyone on earth —
more than his own mother, more than himself. He needed
me ! Me ! I would have treasured every sigh, every word,
every sign, every glance.”

I felt like a chill grip on my chest. “Don’t,” I said, in
a muffled voice.

“Forgive me, I — I — have mourned so long in silence —
in silence. ... You were with him — to the last ? I think of
his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would
have understood. Perhaps no one to hear . . .”

“To the very end,” I said shakily. “I heard his very last
words. ...” I stopped in a fright.

“Repeat them,” she said in a heart-broken tone. “I
want — I want — something — something — to — to live with.”

I was on the point of crying at her, “Don’t you hear
them?” The dusk was repeating them in a persistent
whisper all around us — in a whisper that seemed to swell
menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. “The
horror ! The horror ! ”

The irony of this passage about Kurtz is superbly done,
and has in its context an enormous effect. It is different
from Hardy’s use, at once more open and more subtle,
and done for a different purpose, to bring out the
mysterious darkness, the baffling duality of man’s nature.
This is very important when one comes to consider later
Conrad’s view of the world and the stress he lays on faith
and honesty. [A somewhat comparable use of irony is
seen in Victory — there is a symbolic emphasis here on
Lena’s voice, the symbol, unlike Kurtz, of innocence ;

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL -

and Conrad’s curious combination of romanticism and
irony (to be seen later much more subtly in Lord Jim)
is brought out by this emphasis — her voice is for Heyst
both salvation and destruction; but for it the tragedy
would not have happened; but for it, likewise, Heyst
would not have been regenerated.]

Conrad however is master not only of this subtle
method of procedure in the tales where Marlowe figures
but of quiet and straightforward narrative, and also of a
sort of atmospheric and romantic effect. Indeed he has
come to be almost identified with this last style, and to be
regarded with disfavour on that account. Later, I hope
to show that Conrad himself in Lord Jim (in many ways
his most important book) gives a very subde exposure of
the problem of “ romanticism” and suggests its cure. At
the moment I wish to consider the group of short stories
and novels in the romantic “genre.” As a first example,
one might take the short story called The Inn of the Two
Witches — it is in its way a perfect accomplishment, even
though its way is that of melodrama — the English sailor
on the unknown Spanish coast, the suspicious gaiety of
the lowland innkeeper, the disappearance of the English-
man’s servant, his apprehensive arrival at nightfall at the
dark Inn of the Witches set by itself on an impassable
track in the heart of the hills — the atmosphere of suspicion,
of strangeness, of fear is wonderfully caught throughout;
as an excursion into the fantastic, even if the excursion
runs on 'fairly well-known fines, it is perfecdy done.
This power of creating atmosphere can be seen, more
admirably, in The Nigger of the Narcissus. Here the effect
produced is that on the minds of a ship’s crew by one of

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’ THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

their number, a nigger, who refuses to work because
Death may claim him at any moment ; when he dies and
his body is cast overboard, the spirit of unrest and mutiny
which has hung over the ship seems to lift away like a
cloud, as though the emanation of the spirit of revolt and
antagonism had been contained in the lonely desperate
figure of James Wait, with his queer pride in his com-
panion Death. The comparison which suggests itself here
is a poetic one, with the Ancient Mariner , a comparison
which has also been claimed, rightly I think, for The
Shadow Line , where a ship seems to refuse to pass the
latitude where the body of her late captain lies buried,
and where the atmosphere of the supernatural and un-
canny is given by a few suggestive touches.

Conrad is generally concerned with the unanalysable,
the intangible, which exists as a vast background to the
rational and explicit. When not under strict control, this
interest leads him into a kind of pseudo-romanticism,
often co-existing with the authentic one, as I think
happens in Victory and again in The Rover; and “purple
patches” of a rhetorical kind can occur even in a novel
mainly straightforward. Conrad was not by any means
a “pure” artist, as his style shows ; that turbid, over-
decorated, over-cadenced style which can however at its
best produce the flashlight revelation of poetry — as for
instance in The Rescue or Nostro mo, — and which has an
extraordinary range of evocative imagery. Perhaps it
would be true to say that though Conrad’s ’ settings,
particularly in the tropics, may be almost as romantic as
a fairy-tale, yet in his actual studies of human beings he
never strays far from reality. Even in the early Almayer s

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

Folly, where the heat seems to shimmer like a transparent
veil over the characters, the blaze of colour and luxuriance
serves chiefly as a background for the passionate story of
Nina and Dain — a meaningful background ; Nina is in
keeping with her setting and one thinks of her as of a
brilliant-plumaged bird of Paradise. The colour is more
glaring, more violent here than in the later books, but
the sombre reverse side is seen in the melancholy, warped
life of Almayer and in the suggestion of native craft and
guile — a note struck with more insistence,, and with a
deeper effect of horror in Heart of Darkness.

Generally speaking, Conrad is most romantic in stories
whose setting is in the tropics, and most realistic in those
where the background is the sea, although sometimes both
modes combine in one book. His descriptions of the sea
are unrivalled, in its stuffings of mood and its terrors.
The very feeling of a storm is given in, for instance, The
Nigger of the Narcissus, when the ship is beating round the
Cape, and nothing but dogged perseverance saves the
crew, or in Typhoon. And we are given, too, the spirit of
unswerving devotion which characterizes the real sailor.
Like Hardy’s knowledge of the Wessex peasant, Conrad’s
knowledge of the sailor is bound up with his environ-
ment ; there is a bond between the sea and the man who
labours on it, they complement each other, just as the
landscape in Hardy is the natural complement to the
earth-worker. The picture is given faithfully with the
accuracy which Conrad’s own early experiences would
furnish, and the vividness which belongs to his creative
power. He is aware of the cruelty, as well as the allure,
of its fascinations.

126

THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

Yet his main interest is not in the background, but in
the individual lives of particular men, though generally
he* is conditioned in his choice just as Wordsworth was,
by interest not so much in the individual variations as in
the broad similarities which ultimately emerge. This may
be to place the emphasis wrongly, however. It would
certainly be wrong not to stress the range of Conrad’s
delineation of men, their actions and feelings given to us
by a dramatic situation or set of situations, or revealed
in the long-drawn-out, leisurely, intricate reminiscence of
Marlowe — Captain Whalley, Tom Lingard, Razumov,
Heyst, Lord Jim, Kurtz — they are all different and 'all
differentiated. As a rule the chief characters are men, but
Conrad can draw exquisite portraits of women. Flora
de Barral is herself the centre of the conflicting mesh of
circumstance with which Chance is concerned, that book
of patient searching out of mmost motive; in Under
Western Eyes Natalie is almost as important as Razumov.
His women are purely feminine beings, emotional but not
sentimental, and especially endowed with sympathetic
understanding; passionate sometimes, though rarely;
austere, but with a gracious sweetness behind the aus-
terity ; of the type of Hermione rather than Cleopatra.
But again what a range ! From Natalie Haldane the stem
young enthusiast with her passion for simple truth, to
Mrs. Gould’s delicate tenderness which conceals an im-
mense capacity for suffering.

But the women, delicately etched portraits as they are,
do not have the place in the tales which belongs to the
men. And it is true to say that the final impression
which emerges from the romantic, the intricate or the

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

plain direct approach is one, perhaps as Henry James
might have said, of the surroundedly labyrinthine maze
and emphatically of the fundamental simplicity of the
response. All the tales are in essence accounts of a singl e
soul’s adventures. This is very clearly seen in the group
of novels and stories characterized by quiet and straight-
forward narrative. Conrad, whose main characteristic
is an exuberant richness, knows how to be sparing in his
words and at times achieves almost an epic simplicity.
The short story called The End of his Tether is direct and
unvarnished in its poignancy, but the two chief examples
of this bare style are of course Under Western Eyes and
The Secret Agent. The latter book is perhaps a tour de
force rather than anything else, but Under Western Eyes
surely deserves to rank, in its different way, with Chance.
The undecorated anguish of Razumov becomes almost
intolerably piercing, until it is with a sense almost of
physical relief that one hears of the end of his mental
sufferings after confession — for the bodily suffering which
directly ensues seems of small account compared with the
agony of indecision with which he has been tortured.

The plot of this book reveals one of Conrad’s funda-
mental and recurring ideas — the theme, here of conscience,
elsewhere of duty. In a greater or less degree the same
theme comes out continually. Here, for instance,
Razumov the hard-working, industrious student has to
choose between sheltering an anarchist who is his fiend
and who seeks his house uninvited to hide, and betraying
him to the authorities. After stormy deliberation with
himself, he takes the latter course, and spends the rest of his
life trying to escape from the atmosphere of intrigue and

128

- THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

suspicion with which he is surrounded as the result of the
violation of his word. Again^the situation in The Rescue
is a similar one, though the emphasis here is rather on the
press of life and circumstance which enchain a man ; yet
here too it is a case of faith broken which brings about
the catastrophe. But of course the most notable example
is Lord Jim ; this is very important and therefore calls for
some further discussion. Jim is a youth whose imagina-
tion is too strong for his sense of duty, and who therefore
in a crisis, by 4 momentary instinctive action, done almost
without realization, abandons his sinking ship and saves
his life. What the book relates is his inward rehabilita-
tion, to put matters right with himself, to set constantly
such an ideal of honour before himself and to follow it,
that he may have the confidence of knowing that he can
trust his own strength. An ordinary idea enough. The
interest lies in an unusual emphasis on Conrad’s part. Lord
Jim is obviously a romantic ; he fails to act in a situation of
danger because of his miserable imagination of what might
happen. His friend Marlowe seeks advice on his behalf
from a shrewd old friend of his, a German scientist, the
collector of butterflies, to whom he presents Jim’s case as
another “specimen” to be analysed. The answer given
is a profound one, and the passage where it occurs is of
central significance in the book ; one which shows Conrad’s
awareness of his own romantic prepossessions, and one
which symbolizes both the cure for romantic fancy and
also the necessity for the fierce self-discipline implied :

When I finished he uncrossed his legs, laid down his pipe,
leaned forward towards me eamesdy with his elbows on
the arms of his chair, the tips of his fingers together.

I 129

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

“ I understand very well. He is romantic.”

He had diagnosed the case for me, and at first I was quite
startled to find how sklpfe it was; and indeed our con-
ference resembled so much a medical consultation— Stein,
of learned aspect, sitting in an arm-chair before his desk ; I*
anxious, in another, facing him, but a little to one side—
that it seemed natural to ask :

4 ‘What’s good for it ?”

He lifted up a long forefinger.

“There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us
from being ourselves cure!” . . . “We want in so many
different ways to be,” he began again. .“This magnificent
butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it ; but
man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He want
to be so, and again he want to be so. . . .” He moved bis
hand up, then down. ... “He wants to be a saint and he
wants to be a devil — and every time he shuts his eyes he
sees himself as a very fine fellow — so fine as he can never
be. ... In a dream ... I tell you, my friend, it is not good
for you to find you cannot make your dream come true,
for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever
enough. ... A man that is bom falls into a dream like a man
who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air

as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—
nicht wahr ? . . . No ! I tell you ! The way is to the destructive
element submit yourself , 1 and with the exertions of your hands
and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.
So if you ask me — how to be ?”

His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though
away there in the dusk he had been inspired by some
whisper of knowledge. “I will tell you! For that too

there Is only one way In the destructive element immerse !’ 1

... He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one
hand on each side of his face. “That was the way. To

1 The italics are mine.

130

THE TRAGIC IN HARDY AND CONRAD

follow the dream, and again to follow the dream— and so—

ewig — usque adjinem. . . .”

1*

And so Lord Jim follows his dream of honour usque ad
finem and finds the logical end in death. Marlowe’s
words at the end of the book sum up the problem with
delicate discrimination and with a profoundly subtle
ironic undertone:

And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud,
inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively
romantic. . . . 'He goes away from a living woman to
celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of con-
duct. Is he satisfied — quite, now, I wonder > . . . Now he is
no more, there are days when the reality of his pvkrrnrf*
comes to me with an immense, an over whelming force ;
and yet upon my honour there are moments too when he
passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray
amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender him-
self faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades.

The loneliness and the hazard of life are continually
being stressed by Conrad, and the implacable responsi-
bility of each soul to itself. Like Hardy, he has a pro-
found feeling for the tragic ; he sees life as a dark mystery,
where evil and good flourish side by side, where men
cannot realize the vast consequences of their own tiny
actions, or have any real understanding of the minds of
their fellow-men. But almost always, unlike Hardy, man
is represented as “himself the author of his proper woe.”
It is no mean tragedy which Conrad sees played out
before him — man is faulty but he has also a breath of
elemental greatness in him. The essential value lies not
in the tragic fault but in the temper of the hero, the

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL ■

aspiration and striving towards an ideal which encom-
passes and yet escapes hirn, Endeavour is one of the
watchwords of Conrad’s faith ; and duty, loyalty, courage
are virtues which loom largely in his world. There is
something here which invites a Shakespearean com-
parison. Everywhere he sees goodness bound up with
evil, and cessation from goodness leads to untold loss.
His idea of goodness, as Shakespeare’s, is something in
the last resort fundamentally simple. Man must do his
utmost to preserve order; without order^—one is re-
minded of Troths and Cressida — everything would fall to
pieces, be wasted. Duty and faith are ways of preserving
the ultimate order of things, ways of giving stability to
a world attacked by the forces of disruption. Charles
Gould’s remark in Nostromo, the most Shakespearean in
tone of all the novels, on the unrest of the South American
republic with which he has to deal, may be taken to
signify Conrad’s view of life :

What is wanted here is law, good faith, order, security.

Both Hardy and Conrad might be adduced as a cor-
rective to that disintegration which is to be found, as
Virginia Woolf herself stated most clearly, in con-
temporary writers — a corrective which includes, in its
complexity, both bitterness and irony as elements of
strength.

MOORE AND JOYCE
A CONTRAST

No better contrast could be found than these two writers,
who are alike perhaps only in two things, that they are
Irish and that they are prose-writers. In Moore the Ifish
background is only secondary ; he very obviously derives
from France, as his wit, his sharp intelligence, his lack of
sentiment show. He is an admirable foil to his fellow-
nationaEst, beside whose Pilgrim’s Progress or Odyssey of
the soul, Ulysses, Moore’s Ave atque Vale seems almost
like a child’s playing with toys.

Yet Moore c annot be dismissed lightly. He . has som e-
thing of Horatian elegance, of the intelligence of the
eighteenth century, the witty impudence and ujbanity
of Pope, something too oFthe observant eye of Chaucer^,
"But of the malicious Chaucer in whom coarseness and
mbanity are combined . He is essentially cri ti cal and d e-
structive, and in him the pure play of intelligence seems
to become something rather decadent, a self-disintegrating
force.' "This is I think because in himjthe artistic and die
pers ona l self exist as it were on different levels, and
because hejs.fimdamentally un-serious.

His first importan t wo rk, how ever, Esther Waters, isan
exception, and an admirable exception. It is a sympathetic
133

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL ,

study of “low life” done with an accurate and under-
standingeye, and, particularly if read in comparison
Hardys Tess, brings out Moore’s. especial virtues. ~ji?5c
expresses in this book something of the patient passive"
suffering of the non-intellectual, the “animal” 'nature"
that is heart-rending in its dumb acceptance of misery.
But at the same time he shows also in Esther’s character
“and" in the attitude of the others, a power of adaptation,""'
oFcominon sense (one might almost say of horse sense);
of prose reaction to the situation, which is utterly differeM
from the poetic and tragic feeling of Hardy. Moore is
fundamentally incapable of tragedy; but his treatment
of the theme here has much of the sober yirtue ' o?
inexhaustible common life.

His formal artistry, shown later most exquisitely and
subtly both in Heloise and Abelard and The Brook Kerith,
can be very easily perceived here by placing in juxta-
position the opening and close of the tale. These are the
opening sentences which first bring Esther to our notice :

She stood on the platform watching the receding tr ain.
The white steam curled above the few bushes that hid the
curve of the line, evaporating in the pale evening. A
moment more and the last carriage would pass out of sight,
the white gates at the crossing swinging slowly forward to
let through the impatient passengers.

An oblong box painted reddish-brown and tied with a
rough rope lay on the seat beside her. The movement of
her back and shoulders showed that the bundle she carried
was a heavy one, and the sharp bulging of the grey linen
cloth that the weight was dead. She wore a faded yellow
dress and a black jacket too warm for the day. . . . She was
laughing now, the porter having asked her if she were

134

MOORE AND JOYCE— A CONTRAST

afraid to leave her bundle with her box. Both, he said,
would go up together in die donkey-cart. The donkey-
-cart came down every evening to fetch parcels.

And these are the closing paragraphs of the book :

The train passed across the vista, and the women won-
dered how long it would take Jack to walk from the

station The wind was rough ; it caught the evergreens

underneath and blew them out like umbrellas ; the grass
had not yet begun to grow, and the grey sea harmonized
with the grey-green land. The women waited on the
windy lawn, their skirts blown against their legs, keeping
their hats on with difficulty. It was too cold for standing
still. They turned and walked a few steps towards -the
house, and then looked round.

A tall soldier came through the gate. He wore a long
red cloak, and a small cap jauntily set on the side of his close-
cEpped head. Esther uttered a Httle exclamation, and ran to
meet him. He took his mother in his arms, kissed her, and
they walked towards Mrs. Barfield together. All was for-
gotten in the happiness of the moment — the long fight for
his Hfe, and the possibiHty that any moment might declare
him to be mere food for powder and shot. She was only
conscious that she had accompHshed her woman’s work —
she had brought him up to man’s estate ; and that was her
sufficient reward. What a fine fellow he was ! She did not
know he was so handsome, and blushing with pleasure and
pride she glanced shyly at him out of the comers of her eyes
as she introduced him to her mistress.

“This is my son, ma’am.”

Mrs. Barfield held out her hand to the young soldier.

“I have heard a great deal about you from your mother”

“And I of you, ma’am. You’ve been very kind to my
mother. I don’t know how to thank you.”

And in silence they walked towards the house.

Both are similar in tone; but between them all the

135

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL *

happenings of one life have been given, and a feeling of
the essential similarity of thq'life-process, its continuity,
in a new life.

Aye clique Vale however is perhaps more typical of the
essential Moore. Here his art is at its freshest, withluT 1
toneof elegant witty conversational ease, not yet hardened
into the conscious perfection of Heloise , but alive and
sprightly. He anticipates Virginia Woolf in Ks an3ynsoT
men taTprocess^ the spring and irrelevance of thoughts;
Ithd in his awareness of the way in which the^mind while
focussing centrally on one thing, is yet conscious of a vast
Ma lhding stream of impressions and sensations on the
periphery — as for instance in this passage where dialogue,
dramatic monologue and running commentary are given
with a background of the enchanting glimmer and scent
of a May evening in September :

“ She is quite right,” I said to myself, as I took a seat under
the apple-tree by the table laid for dmner under the great
bough, “she is quite right. It is the only way out of the
difficulty. If I wouldn’t grieve my brother, I must leave
Ireland. And it would be well to spread the news, for as
soon as everybody knows that I’m going, I shall be free to
stay as long as I please. AE will miss me and John Eglinton ;
Yeats will bear up manfully, Longworth will miss me. I
shall miss them all. . . . But are they my kin ? And if not,
who are my kin ? Steer, Tonks, Sickert, Dujardin — why
enumerate ? Ah, here is he who cast his spell over me from
across the seas, and keeps me here for some great purpose,
else why am I here ? ”

“The warm hour prompted you, AE, to look through
the hawthorns.”

“It was the whiteness of the cloth that caught my eye.”

“And you were surprised to see the table laid under the
136

MOORE AND JOYCE— A CONTRAST

apple-tree in this late season ? But the only change is an
hour less of light than a mof»th ago ; the evenings are as dry
3s they were in July ; no dew falls ; so I consulted Teresa,
who never opposes my wishes— her only virtue. Here she
comes across the sward with lamps ; and we shall dine in
the midst of mystery. My fear is that the mystery may be
deepened suddenly by the going out of the lamps. Teresa
is not very capable, but I keep her for her amiability and her

conversation behind my chair when I dine alone Teresa,

are you sure you’ve wound the lamps ; you’ve seen the oil
flowing over the rim?” She assured me that she had.
44 You cannot haye seen anything of the kind, Teresa. The
lamps have clearly not been wound.” The wicket gate
slammed. 4 ‘Whoever this may be, AE, do you entertain
him. I must give my attention to this lamp. It wouldn’t be
pleasant to fmd ourselves suddenly in the dark. It is you,
John Eglinton ? Well, I’m engaged with this lamp. You
see, Teresa, the oil is rising ; give me a match . . . Teresa
and Moderator Lamps are incompatible. But next year I
shall devise some system of arboreal illumination.”

Moore is obviously a man of letters, with the limitations
and advantages winch that imjmes— the witty, enchanting
artificiality of his naturalism is something which gives at
times an exquisite pleasure just as an ode of Horace may.
Very often of course the trifling tone conceals a good
deal of malicious criticism, as for instance the amusing
reported conversation with Yeats about their intended*
collaboration in writing a play on Diarmuid and Grania :

Yeats was composing, Lady Gregory said, we should
have to wait for him, and we waited, till,* perforce, I had
to ask for something to eat, and we sat down to a meal that
was at once breakfast and lunch. Y eats^stilTtarried, and|it
was whispered round the table that he must have been over-
taken by some sudden inspiration, and at this thought every-

137

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL-

one was fluttered with care. Lady Gregory was about to
send the servant up to knowif the poet would like to have
breakfast in his room, wherr the poet appeared, smiling ap4
dehghtful, saying that just as the clocks were strikingten
the metre had begun to beat, and abandoning himself to the
emotion of the tune, he had allowed his pen to run till it
had completed nearly eight and a half lines, and the con-
versation turned on the embarrassment his prose caused him,
forcing him to reconstruct his scenario. He would have
written his play in half the time if he had begun writing it
in verse.

As soon as we rose from the table Lady Gregory told us
we should be undisturbed in the drawing-room till tea-
time. Thanking her, we moved into the room; the
moment had come, and feeling like a swordsman that meets
for the first time a formidable rival, I reminded Yeats that
in his last letter he had said we must decide in what language
the play should be written — not whether it should be
written in English or in Irish (neither of us knew Irish), but
in what style.

“Yes, we must arrive at some agreement as to the style.
Of what good will your dialogue be to me if it is written,
let us say, in the language of Esther Waters ?”

“Nor would it be of any use to you if I were to write it
in Irish dialect ?”

Yeats was not sure on that point; a peasant Grania
appealed to him, and I regretted that my words should have
suggested to him so hazardous an experiment as a peasant
Grania.

“You’ll allow me a free hand in the construction ? But
it’s the writing we are not agreed about, and if the writing
is altered as you propose to alter it, the construction will be
altered too. ... But there’s no use getting angry. I’ll try to
write within the limits of the vocabulary you impose upon
me, although the burden is heavier than that of a foreign
language. I’d sooner write the play in French.”

138

MOORE AND JOYCE— A CONTRAST

“Why not write it in French ? Lady Gregory will trans-
late it.”

And that night I was awakened by a loud knocking at my
d&or, causing me to start up in bed.

“What is it? Who is it? Yeats!”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but an idea has just occurred
to me.”

And sitting on the edge of my bed he explained that the
casual suggestion that I preferred to write the play in French
rather than in his vocabulary was a better idea than he had
thought at the time.

“How is |hat, Yeats ?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“Well, you see, through the Irish language we can get a
peasant Grania.”

“But Grania is a king’s daughter. I don’t know what you
mean, Yeats ; and my French ”

“Lady Gregory will translate your text into English.
Taidgh O’Donoghue will translate the English text into
Irish, and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back
into English.”

This sharpness and acuteness of observation and the
slyness of the humour with its touch of mocking malice
[Marry , sir, this is miching mallecho) and its realism is per-
haps the most typical aspect of Moore’s writing. It
combines the naughtiness of the gamin with intelligence
and is admirable when used, legitimately, for pricking^
foolish bubbles or when jesting on a subject which lends
itself to the mock-heroic ; as, for instance, that superb
comic scene when Moore and AE set out on bicycles
to visit some tumuli, the supposed home of the gods in
ancient peasant belief, and are involved in punctured
tyres and absurd arguments about the speaking of Irish
with a young man who is introduced as having blue

139

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL-

Celtic eyes and. a Lancashire burr. Not only is there
alert and pricking humour ; there is also a power of ex-
pression, of rapid, colloquial and vivid prose which rcpSTs
in its ease and mastery of movement the wit and elegance,
though not the seriousness, of Dryden.

Yet it would be unfair not to say that ^Ave atcjue Vale
other qualities are seen, which appear in the later works
mjnore susta ined fashion, among them pardc2afty"a
sensuous apprehension of beauty (obvious of course in^
Hefo'ise and offset there by a pungent salt realism)". The
passage which occurs in the middle of tEe scene described
"aBbve is as good as any to illustrate this :

The miles flowed under our wheels. We had come so far
that it seemed as if we might go on for another hundred
miles without feeling tired, and the day, too, seemed as if it
could not tire and darken into night. There was no sign of
night in the sky, but the earth was darkening under the tall
hedges ; we passed a girl driving her cows homeward. She
drew her shawl over her head, and I said that I remembered
having seen her long ago in Mayo, and AE answered,

“ Before the tumuli, she was.”

We cycled mile after mile, descending the great road that
leads into Drogheda, and as we came down the hill we saw
the lamps in the main street ; all the rest of the town was
lost in shadow, and beyond the town a blue background, as
likely as not the sea . . . if Drogheda be a seaport town.

The simplicity of the first paragraph cannot disguise
its poetic feeling, any more than the irresponsibility of the
last sentence, delightful as it is here, something a little
flippant about its author.

And it is this impression of flippancy, of frivolousness,
which is forcibly im ^ by comparison with

140

MOORE AND JOYCE— A CONTRAST

Joyce. How shallow, how impertinent (in the Latin sense
of that word) Moore’s work appears beside the tortured
arTgwish and disgust of the Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. When one thinks of the Portrait, one remembers
Keats’ words in the preface to Endymion :

The imagination of a boy is healthy and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy ; but there is a space of life
between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character
undecided, the tyay of life uncertain. . . .

One thinks too of Yeats’ verse :

Out of Ireland have we come.

Great hatred, little room,

Maimed us at the start

and in particular, of another tortured and great mind.
Swift. For Joyce, like Swift, is desperately aware of the
horror and filth of mankind, and also of its sensual appeal.
His book reveals the tortures of a nature which is both
sensual and ascetic and which cannot find satisfaction in
the religion which forms an essential part of its back-
ground. There is a striking comparison here between
Moore’s self-debate on the choice for him between
Protestantism and Roman Catholicism — a self-debate
which leads him into more witty, amusing, polished
conversations with, for instance, Kuno Meyer :

My argument had been repeated so often that it had
become a little trite, and a suspicion intruded upon my
mind as I hurried from St. Augustine, through Dante,
Boccaccio, and Ariosto, that my narrative had grown weary.
Or was it that Meyer, being a Professor, could not grasp at
once that we must choose between literature and dogma t
A perplexed look came into his face as I sketched out in
141

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL'

broad lines the sixteenth and seventeenth literature in France.
As I was about to proceed northward through Denmark,
Sweden, and Norway, Meyer asked questions which rev^fefl
the professor latent in him, and while answering him and
trying to persuade him out of his professorial humours, I
fell to thinking that perhaps he would enjoy himself better
in a debate on the Shakespearian drama, or the debt that the
dramatists of the Restoration owed to Moliere. He would
delight in satisfying our curiosity regarding the inevitable
Mademoiselle de Scudery, whose festoons and astragals are
of course plainly to be descried in the works of Pope and
Prior. So do we often criticize our friend 'and he sitting
opposite to us, little thinking how he is being torn to pieces.

How brilliant that is and how enchanting, in its com-
bination of the lightness of Pope’s touch and the good
humour of the Swift of The Battle of the Books — or all
the musings and speeches which follow, with his brother,
with Ernest Longford, with Dr. Mahaffy, given with a
seeming artlessness and a shrewd penetration only pos-
sible to a mind which is impudently urbane, self-poised,
and detached. And then one reads the dialogue at the
end of Joyce’s Portrait:

Stephen . . . reopened the discussion at once by saying :
“I fear many things : dogs, horses, firearms, the sea,
thunderstorms, machinery, the country roads at night/’
“But why do you fear a bit of bread
“I imagine,” Stephen said, “that there is a malevolent
reality behind those things I say I fear.”

“Do you fear then,” Cranly asked, “that the God of the
Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if
you made a sacrilegious communion e”

“The God of the Roman catholics could do that now,”
Stephen said. “I fear more than that the chemical action
which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a
142

MOORE AND JOYCE— A CONTRAST

symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of
authority and veneration.” *

-** “Then,” said Cranly, “you do not intend to become a
Protestant?”

“I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen answered, 44 but
not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation
would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and
coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and in-
coherent ? . . . I will not serve that in which I no longer
believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or
my church : and I will try to express myself in some mode
of life or art, as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using
for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence,
exile, and cunning. ... You made me confess the fears dfet*
I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do
not fear to be alone or to be spumed for another or to leave
whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a
mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and
perhaps as long as eternity too.”

Beside this, almost clumsy in its earnestness, how
shallow, how irresponsible appear all Moore’s airy and
perfectly executed gestures. Joyce is undoubtedly a seri-
ous moralist. I have said that one thinks of Swift in
connection with him, and one is tempted also to compare
him with Donne because of a certain searing quality of
imagination — the Donne of the Satires or of the agonized,
doubtings in the Divine Sonnets ; or, because of the stern-
ness of his vision, with St. Augustine and his condemna-
tion of the flesh. For the author of the Portrait and of
that suffering Odyssey, Ulysses , is a “fallen man,” one
who is aware of the attraction of the body, and mortally
afraid of it, who has been brought up in the ascetic^
medieval view, that the material world is sinful. But

143

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL.

for Joyce the personal problem cannot be solved by ad-
herence to the Cathohc faith,' and I suppose one may say
that we owe the artistic Joyce to that fact — the artjslEfc
Joyce is as it were a record of the tortured sufferings of a
Swift without Swift’s orthodoxy, and in both there is a
similar cruelty, the savage cruelty of someone who is
experiencing a mortal wound.

As a thinker, Joyce’s view of evil and his position with
regard to evil is a fascinating one. As an artist, what
makes him important is perhaps chiefly his extraordinary
power over words to render his experience. " The manner
'swhich he is afterwards to develop, to the despair of critics,
is seen already in the Portrait, in for instance the passage
where 'Stephen walks by the water’s edge (perhaps it is
not too fantastic to stress the importance of the element
of water for Joyce; for him explicitly in Anna Livia
Plurabelle and implicitly throughout, -without the need to
embark on Freudian speculation, it is useful as a sexual
symbol, and therefore as a symbol of the processes of life) :

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it
sofdy to himself :

A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a
chord. Words. Was it their colours ? He allowed them
to glow and fade, hue after hue ; sunrise gold, the russet
and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-
fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours ; it
was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then
love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their
association of legend and colour i Or was it that, being as
weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure
from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through
the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied

144

MOORE AND JOYCE— A CONTRAST

than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual
emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose ?

■ ^He passed from the trembling bridge on to firm land
again. At that instant, as it seemed to him, the air was
chilled, and, looking askance towards the water, he saw a
flying squall darkening and crisping suddenly the tide. A
faint click at his heart, a faint throb in his throat told him
once more of how his flesh dreaded the cold infra-human
odour of the sea ; yet he did not strike across the downs on
his left but held„ straight on along the spine of rocks that
pointed against the river’s mouth. . . .

There was a long rivulet in the strand, and as he waded
slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift q£
seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved
beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of
the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the
high drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him
silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him
and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was
singing in his veins. . . .

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the
wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and.
wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish
waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled
grey sunlight and gayclad hghtclad figures of children and
girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.

Obviously this is written by one who is trying to make
words as fluid as possible, to catch even while they dis-
perse, shades of feeling, before the intellect has crystallized
them. (First published in 1916, it must have influenced
very greatly all but the very early work of Virginia
Woolf.) Both in Ulysses and in Anna Livia Plurabelle
the process is carried further ; in both he is fascinated by ~
the tones of the living voice and its infinite shifts and

K *45

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL'

variations, and therefore in the latter he returns to what
he knows best, the person^ intonations of a partictdar
Irish dialect, with the river Liffey as a sort of central
spirit or emanation. (One might point out that in this
interest he approaches the position of Moore and Yeats
as-set forth in Ave :

“It is through the dialect,' ” he (Yeats) said, “that one
escapes from abstract words, back to the sensation inspired
directly by the thing itself.”)

The sensation inspired directly by the thing itself is obviously
^what Joyce, in common with most poets, wishes to
achievp. In the close of Anna Livia Plurabelle , for all the
first apparent difficulty, I think he is successful, and in
this new and individual way :

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of.
Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho ! Are you not
gone ahome ? What Tom Malone ? Can’t hear with bawk
of bats, all the lifleying waters of. Ho, talk save us ! My
foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told
of Shaun or Shem ? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks
hear us. Night ! Night ! My ho head halls. I feel as
heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun ? Who
were Shem or Shaun the living sons or daughters of?.
Night now ! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm ! Night night !
Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of,
hitherandthithering waters of. Night !

In Anna^ Livia Plurabelle , then, the theme of life and the
life-process is expressed by means of the broken, bawdy,
symbolical phrases which run rhythmically into and from
each other like the flowing of the river or the current of
life itself. But in most of Work in Progress the process is

146

MOORE AND JOYCE-A CONTRAST

carried further. Logical transitions in structure are left
out, words are added to qr subtracted from words or
par-ts of words in such a way as to make meaning difficult
for anyone but the author, and the danger of purely
private meanings is becoming obvious.

Just as in his early Ivork he shows an almost medieval
attitude towards the natural world, so in his later phase
another medieval characteristic — it is very important to
remember that Joyce was trained as a Jesuit and therefore
ii%: rigidly traditional and exacting disciphne — makes its
appearance ; it might be called an interest in gram mafr
or rhetoric. The interest of the later Joyce is almost
purely an interest in language ; and from his work many
developments have followed. There is a parallel move-
ment in philosophy ; the analytic school of Wittgenstein
rests, one might say, on a grammatical basis. In literature
Joyce has been the parent of such different children as
Gertrude Stein (her automatic writing lacks the severe
control of Joyce, however), Hemingway, and possibly
Auden if one considers the new experiments with lan-
guage and grammar which he makes in his poetry.
Joyce’s method is obviously to make play with free
association, but whereas Virginia Woolf does this with
ideas, he does it with words; and one is forced to say
sometimes that his work has the interest of a clinical
document rather than of art. He seems to me to be a very
lonely genius, towering above most of his contemporaries
in a sort of blind isolation, blind because perhaps mis-
guided ; and the importance of his great work may lie
in the future rather in the hands of the psychologists as a
case-book, than with writers and literary critics.

K2 147

A NOTE ON
KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Katherine Mansheld, in spite of the maturity and per-
tsfortion of some of the tales, must be regarded as a writer
of promise rather than of fulfilment. Her Journal reveals
the fact that some time before her death she had decided
for artistic reasons temporarily to give up writing, in
order to write differently in the future. She was her own
hardest critic and she felt a lack in her work which at that
time she was unable to supply. Had she lived it seems
inevitable that she would have produced something richer
and more significant than even the best of her tales.

Yet as it stands, her work is unmistakeably of a high
order. Like Tchekov, she was a story-teller of the first
rank. The two have much in common but the similarity
is not one of discipleship ; Katherine Mansfield’s indi-
'Viduality is impressed on everything she wrote. Yet the
approach to their material is similar. Both try to arrest
within the limits of the short-story, an emotion, an
evanescent moment that lights up the play of character,
an atmosphere, rather than to narrate an event or record
a crisis. From both one obtains a sense of adjustment, of
harmony.

This harmony results partly from the fact that Katherine

148

A NOTE ON KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Mansfield does not shrink from the ugly aspects of life but
accepts them as part of it. The story in Bliss, Je ne parle
pasfrangais, shows a deliberate attempt to grapple with
not only the ugly but the abnormal, and though it is not
a complete success, itfhows a power of dealing with other
people’s emotions from the inside and of making an jm-
familiar character live.’ The same sympathetic participa-
tion is seen in the stories, Pictures, Life of Ma Parker, and
The Cook’s Story 5 where characters from an unlovely side
of life are made to reveal the poignancy and pathos in-
herent in them/ Her way is to take a single isolated.,
incident, a small occurrence, and to light it up with all the
implications contained in it so that the full significance is
interpreted. Her work is delicate, but because the sym-
pathetic observation is unerring and profound it carries
its own strength with it.

One of the most marked characteristics of her work is
her acute sensibility to impressions. Like Proust, she
remembers and records detail with a sensitiveness so fine'
and subtle that it is almost painful. All is not only
observed but felt. Numerous passages in the Journal
indicate how every impression was received and given
forth again with its particular — and often complex —
emotional value. But it is to be noted that, again like
Proust, Katherine Mansfield orders her impressions until
they form an artistic whole. [It is perhaps worth noting
too, that the tale A Married Man’s Story is somewhat like
Proust in manner, in method of approach.] But the im-
portant thing is that in her work along with the sensibility .
there is a definite intellectual control. This is very
apparent when the story has arisen out of some intimate

149

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

personal experience ; for example, the mental agony re-
corded in the Journal entry of January 1920 is obviously
connected, with the story The Man without a Temperament
which was worked out at this time and of which the
origin is clearly to be found in Katharine Mansfield’s own
kfe.

All her work from the earliest- stories shows this
maturity, this clear and unfumbling knowledge of what
she is doing. Often the idea to be conveyed, the feeling
to be communicated, is done as it were aside v with a subde
^touch which gives a new freshness and clarity to the
meaning; but it is never done unconsciously. The
medium of expression is always equal to what has to be
expressed. The little sketch called The Samuel Josephs,
for example, seems to be an earlier version of part of the
theme of Prelude. Except for the omission of one longish
scene with the Samuel Josephs at play, which in itself is
excellent and may well have been reserved for later use,
the changes that take place in the later version are very
few. A word or phrase is altered to sharpen the im-
pression and make it more vivid, and there is the signi-
ficant omission of two paragraphs which are less concrete,
more loose and spread than the rest. Or again, compare
any of the tales in Something Childish but very Natural with
any of those in the last book, The Dove’ s Nest. The effects,
it is true, in the latter case, are obtained by fewer strokes,
but the essential quality of the writing is the same. The
stories when she begins writing have a practically perfect
technique ; when she finishes, the technique is quite per-
fect. The advance is simply one of elimination— of sup-
pressing everything that is not completely necessary for

150

A NOTE ON KATHERINE MANSFIELD

the purposes of the story. .This perfection of technique is
in itself a danger, and some of the later tales are tours de
forte. The risk in short-story writing is of let ting the tale
become a “situation” ; that is, of letting the arrangement
of the movement, fhe crisis, of the tale supersede its
significance. This is^what happens in the well-managed
story Bliss, and agai^ hi A Cup of Tea ; the structure is so
perfect that one does not realize at first that it is artificial.
But this was not what Katherine Mansfield was most con-
cerned with # and she realized the difficulty — two stories
(Widowed, and Second Violin, of which only fragments,
remain) were abandoned by her because they “felt
betrayed.” What she was concerned with was something
very different from situation or effect.

Her notion of art was something supremely difficult and
supremely simple. In the fournal 1921 she writes, “To
me, life and work are two things indivisible. It’s only by
being true*to life that I can be true to art. And to be true
to life is to be good, sincere, simple, honest.” How close a
connection art and life had for her is revealed by the ■
fournal, and how agonizing. But it is to be noted that it
is not the emotions of the writer that are obtruded in her
work. The third outstanding characteristic of the tales is
their objectivity. She remarks in the Journal, * ‘ One must
learn, one must practise to forget oneself. I can’t tell die
truth about . . . unless I am free to look into her life
without self-consciousness.” In this she is noticeably
different from the school of writers characterized best by
Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, whose works, in spite
of the figures that obtain life in them, are essentially
(as for instance in The Waves ) records of different aspects

151

SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEL

of the author’s personality. f What one obtains most
strongly through the people and. events there shown, is
the impression of a definite expression of temperament,
of a considered or unconscious judgment. TCadipnV
Mansfield’s work was of the opposite, in intention and
effect. She has accepted life; cofhpare the agonizing
pages in the Journal of 1920. ‘ ‘ Thefe^’s no limit to human

suffering What must one do ; There is no question

of ‘passing beyond it.’ This is false. One must submit.
Do not resist. Take it. Be overwhelmed. Accept it
fully. Make it part of life. . . . The fearful pain will fade.

I must turn to work. I must put my agony into some-
thing, change it.”

This acceptance of fife in its entirety is perhaps the key
to her work, which includes, in its sympathetic and pene-
trating observation, characters widely divergent both in
accidentals, and in temperament and feeling. What she
records, truthfully and omitting nothing that is relevant,
are the different phases of life that have struck her con-
sciousness. Perhaps the best example to point this state-
ment is the story called The Young Girl, an impressionistic v
sketch which is imaginatively true — the origin of the tale
is probably to be found in the Journal entry of April 12,
5920, and indicates from what slight impressions the com-
pleted effect is produced. The value lies both in the depth
and sensitiveness of the impression and in the imaginative
comprehension with which it is rev-built.

Yet is it enough to say that by her art she recorded, at
once delicately and with strength, impressions of life
snatched from time and made, by the exquisite responsive-
ness of her style, to re-live ? It is somehow too cold a

152

A NOTE ON KATHERINE MANSFIELD

b

judgment. In the tales which represent her genius best,
in The Doll’s House, in Prelude, in At the Bay, there is some-
thing more than this. These tales are indubitably of the
highest order ; had she lived one may speculate that she
would have produced work like this in quality if not in
subject. The difference between them and the other j^les
is one of more inte^ feeling. They are all concerned
with the life which she had known so vividly in New
Zealand in her childhood, and perhaps because she knew
she was now cut off from it, she has made it re-live in a
way in which none of the other tales do. It is a tribute to t
the objectivity of her art, and to its power, that the per-
sonal loss which forced her to begin the tales has jresulted
in this un-selfconscious, comprehending participation.

Perhaps At the Bay is the more rounded and complete.
In the limits of one day various episodes in the life of the
Burnell family are presented to us, so vividly and natur-
ally that the people become alive, from Pat the handyman
and Alice the servant-girl to Kezia and her grandmother.
But the importance lies not in the episodes taken by them- .
selves, but in the subtle way in which they form a whole,
at once real and significant. It is very remarkable that in
her later work what becomes more and more stressed is
not the incident or episode in itself but its implication of
the life outside it. The Doll’s House, in its exquisite and
tender feeling, is much more than a piece of childhood
re-caught. And so in Prelude, which is perhaps the best
tale she wrote, through the life of the family in its variety
and reality of detail we obtain an impression of life itself,
in its ugliness, humour, pathos, weakness, and beauty.
The medium of communication — that clear delicate prose

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SOME STUDIES IN THE MODERN NOVEt-

which can express, and. both unforgettably, the lyric fresh-
ness of early morning and^ the complicated play of
character, is here seen at its height. Partly because oftfie
delicacy of interpretation, partly because of the strength
of feeling, these tales have in great Sneasure the effect of
poetry. All is suffused in a warm tender light, a light that
reveals, and illuminates.

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